The Best Free Syntax Highlighting Editor is ….?

Posted by  on Wednesday, June 18th 2008   

Anybody have a preference for a text editor (for Windows)? Although free is preferred, I’ll take suggestions for non-free options.

My requirements:

  • It needs to be FAST
  • Syntax highlighting for common languages (C#/JavaScript/XML/HTML).
  • Maintained / supported
  • Work on Vista/Server 2003+
  • Multiple documents very important (tabbed)

 

I’d appreciate it if you took 30 seconds to plug what you use.

 

If Visual Studio is running, I use that normally — but if it isn’t, I don’t like the long load time.

Potential freeware candidates… (but I’m sure there are others):

Notepad++

Notepad2

PSPad

Crimson Editor (no longer maintained)

VIM

Programmer’s Notepad

metapad (no longer maintained)

Notetab Light

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Filed under: Coding, Software     
11 Comments   

11 Comments Already

commenter
mwatts Said,
June 18th, 2008 @10:12 am  

EditPadPro from http://www.editpadpro.com/ is not free but it is what I currently use. Reasonably priced and as far as I can tell meets all your requirements.

commenter
Kris Said,
June 18th, 2008 @10:29 am  

Definately VIM. It will take a time investment to become truly comfortable in it (first thing to do is turn off behave mswin), but once you do you will become more productive in your text editor than you can possibly imagine. Text completion (ctrl-p, ctrl-n are your friends), incredibly powerful macros, and tons of other features (if you can get tags working, plus some of the auto commands you can run depending upon the filtype you will be amazed). It is not quite as powerful under windows as it is in a Unix environment (grep, and tags support need some fiddling to get them working). Find a good tutorial and start pluging away, you will be glad you did!

commenter
neilweber Said,
June 18th, 2008 @1:52 pm  

Emacs.

commenter
irkregent Said,
June 18th, 2008 @8:39 pm  

My vote is for Notepad++. I use it almost exclusively for the ASP programming we do at work. I just love how it can handle separate color schemes and syntax highlight schemes for HTML, VBScript and Javascript all within the same document.

commenter
tachetti Said,
June 19th, 2008 @2:32 am  

I always use Ultraedit. Although it’s not free, it has a lot of languages and it’s very fast. Massive replaces and search in files have saved my life a lot of times :P

commenter
Walt Said,
June 19th, 2008 @11:22 am  

I’ve used Notepadd++ for the last 3 years or so. It meets all your requirements, is fast and easy to learn.

It’s what I use when not edting in Visual Studio.

commenter
Walt Said,
June 19th, 2008 @12:59 pm  

I meant Notepad++. I guess I can’t spell this morning.

commenter
vik Said,
June 26th, 2008 @7:04 am  

I use Scite [http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html]. It meets all the criteria you’ve listed. Also, you have great control over syntax highlighting as well as line highlighting. Great control over XML as well.

commenter
scheffler Said,
June 27th, 2008 @12:58 pm  

Used Crimson for the longest time, but have been happily using EmEditor (free version) [http://www.download.com/EmEditor-Free/3000-2352_4-10493299.html] for the last few months.

There’s an updated paid version which has more features, but the free version suits my needs just fine.

commenter
agtrier Said,
July 15th, 2010 @2:07 pm  

Notepad++
Definitely

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