simplest xml editor for non programmers

Question

Hi

I need the simplest editor with utf-8 support for editing xml files in windows; something like wordpad is perfect. It's for a non programmer, to edit existing files (up to now he used wordpad, but now that I translated the files in utf-8 encoding a lot of italian accents are obviously unreadable). Any suggestion?

Thanks, this would really help me out

Regards

Nicola

Answer 1

With Notpead++ it should be painless. Ciao ;)

Answer 2

I'm using Ultraedit for these kinds of things. Not free, but it's quite stable and has lots of other useful features such as remote editing via FTP access.

Answer 3

My own alternative to Notepad++ is SciTE. They both use the SCIntilla engine, so the difference is not very big. I like the fact that SciTE is more configurable, you can remove a lot of menu entries that are not relevant for non programming users.

Answer 4

XML Notepad 2007 provides a simple intuitive user interface for browsing and editing XML documents.

XmlNotepad

Simple, easy, free and small

Answer 5

The simplest editor with UTF-8 support is Windows's built-in Notepad. In general it's fine; the only thing it's likely to trip up on is that it only supports Windows-style CR/LF line endings, making editing bare-LF files a pain.

Notepad is in all cases preferable to the dreadful WordPad, which is likely to mess up your files. The only reason WordPad used to be of use was that it could edit files longer than 64kB in Windows 9x. However Notepad has no trouble with long files in the WinNT series.

There are many, many editors that are a step up from Notepad; they will all give you syntax highlighting to make XML editing slightly clearer. Notepad++ is, notably, free. Generally though the syntax highlighting won't be enough to detect well-formedness errors so you'll still need something to test that, such as loading the file into Firefox, or, for Notepad++, the XML Tools. I used EmEditor with the valid XML checker plugin; EmEditor is a good little editor but it isn't free.

Then there are dedicated XML editors, like XMLNotepad. These will always generate well-formed XML, but the interface may be a bit more intimidating. Certainly they are more suited to data-driven XML than document-style markup.

Answer 6

Thank you all for your responses!

I tried notepad++ with this non-programmer person and he says it's perfect. I didn't know that the old notepad was utf-8 compatible, i didn't take the time to check, but anyway notepad++ is better for our purposes because of its color highlighting.

Thanks again

Nicola

Answer 7

Allthough you already accepted the answer, Notepad2 might be even a simpler alternative to Notepad++. It supports UTF-8 and syntax highlighting and looks allmost like the Windows notepad.
Some people even wrote articles on replacing the Windows notepad with Notepad2 (which can be found on the linked website).