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Intype -TextMate For Windows

You'd think the humble text editor would have had its day as we all move on to fancy IDEs, but still, no web developer's toolbox is complete without a decent one.

My choice has always been TextPad for Windows, although I'm a paid-up user of TextMate for the Mac as well.

Part of me prefers TextMate, but most of me works on Windows so I rarely get to use it. Now though there's a "TextMate for Windows" in the form of Intype. It's still an "alpha" release but it's got real promise.

Development of TextPad seems to have ceased at v4.7. For me, half the fun of software is the buzz of a new version - with all the new features it brings. With Intype being so young there's always seems to be new additions and updates. With TextPad, what you see is all you're ever going to get.

Intype is not nearly as powerful as TextPad or other Notepad-plus-type editors, but then it's not trying to be. The auto completion feature is what does it for me. Create a new file, switch to XHTML mode (Ctrl+Shft+H) and then type html followed by a press of the tab key. Intype generates the whole HTML tag gubbins for you. Now, inside the HEAD tag type "head"+tab. Now type "script"+tab. Inside the generated script tag type "fun"+tab and it creates the body of a new JavaScript function for you. Notice how it selects the function name for you automatically. Overwriting the function name even updates the "// end of function_name" comment after the function. Nice.

With very little typing you can create whole HTML pages. It works for CSS too.

Being a Domino developer you might be wondering what use this is. Good question. It's down to how you code I guess. Personally I often find myself creating plain old HTML files as part of creating a site, well before I get round to fudging it all in to Domino Designer. That said, Intype supports WebDAV, so, in theory, we could even edit files from within the NSF.

Comments

    • avatar
    • Patrick L
    • Mon 12 Feb 2007 05:58 AM

    You should try Notepad ++, it is in active development, has lots of plugins and features and is free!

    {Link}

    btw. I don't think TextPad is unicode compatible which can lead to odd errors if you start trying to edit multibyte html / xml text files.

  1. I use Aptana for web-development (js/(x)html and such)... it's really nice:

    {Link}

  2. Jake,

    I've always been a great fan of UltraEdit.

    {Link}

    Great for writing servlets without installing some heavyweight IDE!

    R/s,

    Charlie

    • avatar
    • noon
    • Mon 12 Feb 2007 02:12 PM

    my vote goes to the notepad++ aswell. It's just great tool :)

  3. I've used EditPlus+ for many years for it's find and replace (across files in a tree) as well as it's extensibility through a Shell call out. e.g. you can "mount" javac and pass args. I chose it over Textpad for the tabbed open file tool bar and the search ability.

    {Link}

    Kate is a nice alternative if you run KDE. I havn't tried any serious pawer editing but it works well for HTML and SH files, so far that I know.

    {Link}

  4. Well, I've seen nobody uses PsPad Editor ... but for me it's the best ( the other ones mentioned are good too, sure! ), because it's programmable, has syntax colour code ( extensible ), autocompletion, etc. and is freeware. It has translations for a lot of languages ....and development is active for now.

    Regards.

    • avatar
    • Rob
    • Mon 12 Feb 2007 06:06 PM

    I used to use jEdit a lot. It's a Java editor and since it's written in Java, it runs on several platforms.

    Now I use NotePad++ when I need to look at a text file of any kind, but I do almost all of my Java agent development in Notes Designer directly. It's a really crappy editor but not so bad that I want to add the overhead of a separate editor.

    I write my CSS and JavaScript directly into a field on a container form I put in every design. It has two fields; title and body. I reference these documents through a view named 'c'.

    Peace,

    Rob:-]

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Tue 13 Feb 2007 07:57 AM

    I also use PSPad, it is a bit slow while starting up but has nice features.

    Aptana also is not bad, Ultraedit also but I did not find the one-and-only editor until now.

    If only the Domino Designer had better support for Javascript, Java and HTML. Can't wait to get my hands on Notes 8 (or Expeditor aka WebSphere EveryPlace aka Workplace Designer or whatever)

    • avatar
    • Scott
    • Fri 16 Feb 2007 04:50 AM

    I'm a EditPlus user myself. But Intype does look rather promising - I'll definatly keep an eye on it. If it adds more features that are common in other editors (like tabs, etc) then I think it'll be a winnder.

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Written by Jake Howlett on Mon 12 Feb 2007

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

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