What are the good free programming text editors for Windows?

Question

I swear this was asked, but I searched, I didn't see anything. Perhaps I missed it, but if not, I'm asking here.

Anyway, I'm looking for a good programmer's editor for Windows. I know about vim and emacs, but they aren't really what I'm looking for. My main focus right now is on jEdit, Notepad2, Notepad++, and Programmer's Notepad. But I would appreciate any feedback that anyone has.

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Answer 1

I currently use Context Editor, simple and quick. Try it!

Answer 2

gVim is the old classic.

NetBeans is pretty good for Java, PHP & Ruby editing

Answer 3

Notepad++

Answer 4

I love notepad++ its very extensible and has a powerful replace engine, syntax coloring for many languages,etc... I'd strongly recommend it.

Answer 5

Crimson Editor is one i like. It hasn't been in active development for quite a while, but I still like it very much. The others that have been posted are good as well.

Answer 6

Besides having a good experience with Crimson Editor, you can certainly try SciTE

Answer 7

Depends what you want to do. The Express SKUs of Visual Studio are free and Visual Studio is an excellent text editor as well as being a good IDE. Very customizable.

Answer 8

Edit+ (editplus.com) is by far the best text editor I have ever encountered.

It has a cost of about $30 if you purchase it, but you can use it forever if you are willing to click the "Yes, I know this is a demo" button each time you start it. It is a full version demo with no time limit. I suggest you purchase it if you like it.

Strengths: Extremely intuitive for working with text, great shortcuts, drag and drop, easy to be very productive very quickly. Can open remote files via FTP for editing, has the best search and replace I have ever used, regex support, and REALLY GOOD spell checker. Very customizable, easily configured, can share configuration through their website with other users, recognizes most programming languages, etc. Works great with multiple files. I used it mainly for php web development, but it's really useful for search and replace and working with regex, so I often find myself using it for data massaging, and other large volume text manipulation projects like generating sql statements from the contents of a spreadsheet, etc.

Weaknesses As a text editor, this has no weaknesses, but if you are looking for an IDE, there is no code folding, debugging, etc. Very sophisticated text editor, and doesn't try to be anything else.

Update: It does have code folding now! I just grabbed the new version - now it is the best++ text editor.

Answer 9

Maybe you're referring to this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/145327/whats-a-windows-text-editor-that-matches-this-criteria

I finally chose JEdit and have customized it with plugins (premade skins, tabbed navigation for source files, etc) and running it on the new Swing Nimbus GUI. It is by far the best editor I've ever used. Especially because the io functions for file manager pane is built on the java api, it doesnt freeze up like the native Windows one does.

Try it. you wont regret :P

Answer 10

Programmer’s Notepad is super lite weight and only has features that most programmers would fine useful.

Answer 11

Jedit is cool, and as it is written Java, works across platforms so you need not switch editors between Linux and Windows.

Answer 12

I like Ulipad for editing Python. It has some decent autocomplete and syntax hint features. Oh you can run it on Windows or Linux.

Answer 13

PSPad is pretty good: http://www.pspad.com/

Answer 14

For "light-weight" + "'config file' style customization" + "has bare essential features", I keep going back to:

SciTE

This build is my favourite (includes right-click context menu wired-up by install).

I've only used the Win32 version, but there are other Scintilla-based editors on other platforms.

Answer 15

A few months ago I went from Notepad++ to jEdit. But just recently, I changed again, to gVim. Vim is impressing me to no end...

Answer 16

I use EmEditor exclusively at work. Its highly customizable and can be fine tuned to however the user wants it. Several of my coworkers and I have written macros for it to make our lives easier. There is a free trial though it will pester you after a month to buy the product. The fact that the developer/s are active on the forums is also helpful.

EmEditor

Answer 17

Check out at E http://www.e-texteditor.com/ - it's rad.

Answer 18

I use Notepad2 when I need a quick, light weight editior.

Answer 19

A little bit old school but you can give a shot at it: http://cream.sourceforge.net/ this is basically a gVim editor but with customization without writing its configuration files, you have predefined themes which are very eye-pleasing, tabbed documents etc.

Answer 20

Visual Studio is now free via the Express editions. http://www.microsoft.com/Express/ Otherwise, for non-VS projects, I tend to favor GVIM. http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc

Answer 21

give a try to EditPlus .. light weight and plenty of features

Answer 22

TextPad is the best - you can get extra syntax highlighting plugins for any language you'd like.

Answer 23

I can recommend vim. It's pain to learn is but if you do that, you will have one common editor across all platforms. Not just for coding. There is a pre-configured version of vim called Cream, good for starters.

Answer 24

One True Editor

Answer 25

A good comparsion of several is here:

http://lifehacker.com/385929/best-text-editors

Answer 26

Just because nobody mentioned it: sublime editor

Otherwise, notepad2 and vim, of course.

Answer 27

You should try Source Insight, it is more of a developer program editing system. Though commercial, but worth its price

Answer 28

Kate (KDE advanced text editor) is a great text editor for Linux and you can get it for Windows too as part of the KDE for windows project.