For Web Developers, text editors are like football - you love your team even though in your heart of hearts you know they’re rubbish. So what happens when you are forced to pick a new team - how do you choose? This is my current predicament - when I’m developing at home I live on my Mac, but after failing to convince the guys here at NuBlue that Macs are superior, I need to find a text editor for Windows that does it for me.

On my Mac, I use TextMate, and I love it. It’s so simple and not over run with a million and one menus with a million and one options. There are no toolbars squashing down the size of my editing screen with buttons that I don’t know what to do with, and at same time it does everything I want. It highlights syntax on all the languages I use most often (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and SQL). It has all the usual search and replace functions, and bundles and collapsing text blocks are fantastic features.

So, I set out on a mission to find the best text editor on PC, and with the amount of them out there it wasn’t a small mission. I started off by asking around the office to see what everyone else used.

The first I tried was TopStyle Pro - great for HTML and CSS with syntax highlighting and some cool short cuts. Its preview is what lost it for me. The preview is designed for HTML and CSS, and it’ll work with other code in there - but if the code’s not right it’ll error or crash fairly quickly. I don’t know about you but when I’m editing code it’s usually because there’s an error somewhere! Don’t get me wrong, TopStyle is great for CSS and good for HTML, but it just isn’t designed for any other code and I need an all rounder. So I moved on.

For PHP I was recommended to use Zend Studio Pro and, while it’s designed for PHP, it handled anything I threw at it (as it should for the price!). Zend Studio has some really useful features like auto completion of functions and variables, which will significantly reduce typos. This development environment looks great for doing huge PHP projects with features like remote debugging and database connectivity, but I will rarely use this feature. In terms of simple edits, Zend Studio has too much functionality and is clunky to start up.

So, moving on, I decided to do some forum hunting to see what everyone else used. The first one I got to was UltraEdit, the ‘number #1 best selling text editor in the world’. I saw it and thought it’s not the cheapest of text editors, and with nearly 2,000,000 users it must be good! I can’t believe how wrong that statement was. I downloaded the free trial and there sitting in front of me was the least user-friendly piece of software I have ever seen. My HCI lecturer at University would have had a field day. There are buttons everywhere, each with a little picture that barely looks like anything let alone something to hint what the button is for. Toolbars were coming out of my ears and when it came to evaluating it I didn’t even know where to begin. A note to the designers of this software - not all the functionality has to be a button on the GUI - it’s ok to just have it in the menu sometimes! How it has won awards I don’t know. The people in forums who love it keep going on about how great it is with huge files – I’m doing website coding. How big are the files going to be? UltraEdit was uninstalled within a day. Just the sight of it now makes me queasy.

I decided that since paying more money for a text editor didn’t make it any good I’d try a free one. I went with PSPad and I actually liked what I found. Even though the basic program was, well, basic, the number of extensions is huge, and there are some really cool ones like escape double quote marks which turns “ into \”. This is so useful for adding PHP to an HTML page. It’s also integrated with TopStyle for doing CSS, so you get best of both worlds. There was a downside though - I didn’t have to work with it too long before I made it crash. There is no doubt it is still buggy and I just don’t have time to keep reopening files only to have them crash all over again.

I thought at this point there was never going to be a text editor on Windows that was right for me. So as a last ditch attempt I googled TextMate for Windows. I thought, well, it’s a long shot, but at the very least I might find a forum article that’ll give me an idea of where to look next. Instead I found ‘E Text Editor – The Power of TextMate on Windows’. At first glance I thought it was too good to be true, but downloading the trial and having a play around I actually believe them. It has all the great features of TextMate like the bundles, and with the very customisable themes I can almost make my PC look as pretty as my Mac!

So after a long old slog through leagues of Windows text editors I finally found one I’ll back through thick and thin and the best bit is I didn’t even have to change teams (just download the new away strip).