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hive fiveBy Adam PashMay 1, 2008 9:00 AM 299,150

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Best Text Editors

From managing our to-do lists and writing code to jotting ideas and keeping a grocery list, nothing beats a solid plain text editor. On Tuesday we asked you to nominate your favorite text editor,and over five hundred passionate comments later, we've whittled yournominations down to the most popular. Hit the jump for a look at theeditors that made the list, and then vote for your favorite to crown theultimate text editor.

NOTE: We had a tie in the top five rankings, so we've actually got six entrants in today's Hive Five. Without further ado, they are:

Notepad++ (Windows)

Notepad++is the go-to text editor for many Windows users looking for somethingbetter than Notepad. It handles most of the advanced features of therest, like syntax highlighting, code folding, and macros, but unlikemost of the other GUI-based text editors featured, Notepad++ iscompletely free and open source. It may not be as sexy off-the-bat asother GUI editors, but it's fully customizable, so you're only limitedby your time and imagination. As for its chops as a text editor, it'shuge following speaks for itself.

Emacs (All Platforms)

Primarily a text editor for serious programmers, Emacs (Editor MACroS)is popular for its built-in macros and powerful keyboard commands thatmake editing text documents—particularly code—a pleasure. The catch:You're not likely to fully appreciate Emacs until you spend some timegetting to know it. The program has been ported to virtually everyplatform and has multiple incarnations, the most popular of which areprobably GNU Emacs and XEmacs, both of which are free, cross platform, and open source.

UltraEdit (Windows)

Shareware application UltraEdit($49.95) is user-friendly programming editor with support for syntaxhighlighting, code folding, macros, and tons of similar featuresavailable to most of the rest. UltraEdit focuses a good deal on webdevelopment platforms, with advanced features built-in for HTML, PHP,JavaScript, and much more.

TextMate (Mac OS X)

Powerful and attractive, TextMate($63) came on the scene just a few years back and quickly gained arabid following for its attractive interface, powerful macros, anddownloadable and editable bundles. Windows users who'd love a littleTextMate on their PC should check out E Text Editor, a text editor that directly apes TextMate and supports TextMate macro bundles.

Vim (All Platforms)

Much like Emacs, Vim (the child of the age-old Vi)is wildly popular for its keyboard macros and powerful set of tools forthe serious programmer. Also like Emacs, Vim is available in severalflavors. Apart from the original, there's gVim or gVim Portable for Windows and MacVimfor the Mac. If you think you might be interested in what Vim has tooffer but you're not ready to dive headfirst into an editor with such anadvanced and sometimes obtuse feature-set, check out Cream.

TextPad (Windows)

The Windows-only TextPad(shareware, $32.50) is much like the rest. It has advanced features forprogrammers like syntax highlighting, code blocking, and macros, alongwith a clip library feature for storing persistent snippets of text.TextPad lovers also boast its searching prowess and ease-of-use.

Now that you've seen the best, it's time to vote for your favorite:

For the most part, the text editors above share many similarfeatures. Keyboard and macro junkies often pit Emacs and Vim againsteach other, and most if not all of the rest put presentation and ease ofuse first, while still providing powerful tools for the plain text andcoding pro. The real measure of a text editor is how it meets yourneeds, and if our original comment threadis any indication, you can't go wrong with any of these options. Ifyou'd like to point out the finer features that make your text editor ofchoice the best—whether it made the list or not—let's hear all about itin the comments.

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Mortimer02 May 2008 4:16 AMIf you want to get into Emacs, try the [www.emacswiki.org]
It's full of very interesting things and pretty useful to bootstrap your customized .emacs.

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