By Adam S on

I heard that yelling 'Vi or emacs' at a UNIX convention is the same as screaming 'fire' in a movie theater.

What text editor do you use for your Drupal development and why?

I use dreamweaver because I can edit files on the server easily. Otherwise I would use Kumodo Edit, which I do use sometimes if I need to make something from scratch or need to debug faulty html output of my Drupal site.

Comments

aaronmchale’s picture

aaronmchale
Primary language English
Location Edinburgh, Scotland
commented

I use SharePoint Designer because it's free and it has a good editing experience.

Azz McH

vm’s picture

vm commented

notepad++

super simple editor with syntax highlighting.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

yep--- i love notepad++. It also has the added bonus of being to convert line endings between windows and *nix formats very easily which I find myself using with patches all the time.

aaronmchale’s picture

aaronmchale
Primary language English
Location Edinburgh, Scotland
commented

Is Notepad++ a Microsoft product?

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Nope: http://tinyurl.com/bc8slc

bewhy’s picture

bewhy commented

you can follow these directions to get drupal files to use the php syntax highlighting:

http://rudyegenias.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/notepad-associate-ctp-file-e...

I don't like any site where I don't have admin menu

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

I'm currently using gedit, the Gnome text editor. It does syntax highlighting and it's blazing fast. Ubuntu can mount remote directories via SSH, so they appear to be local and no FTP monkey business is required. You can get gedit for Windows and OS X, too, but they can't remote-mount directories via ssh without additional software.

When I was working on multiple platforms I used Komodo Edit, which can read/write sftp natively, although it's a separate open/save menu from normal filesystem work. It can analyze the whole Drupal filesystem tree and provide tooltips and autocompletion of function names, etc., but it's fat and slow relative to gedit.

I'm very easily irritated by slow and mushy software, so a number of IDEs with nice features will not make it onto my list.

_gramur’s picture

_gramur commented

+1 for gedit.

_
Founder
Sivius.ca

jevets’s picture

jevets commented

TextMate - code completion, nice & customizable themes, custom macros, nice interface, xml-rpc
http://macromates.com (Mac OS X)

aaronmchale’s picture

aaronmchale
Primary language English
Location Edinburgh, Scotland
commented

I have discovered that Windows, with PHP files saved with the UFT 8 character set, inserts characters before the opening php tags that are not recognized by Windows. This usually causes the Session Cache Limiter error message, in the case of session, and other error messages that are not caused by the programmers code. The solution to this is usually to save the php file using the ASCII character set. This stops the characters from being inserted and removes them if these characters are already saved in the file.

Aaron

heine’s picture

heine commented

This is a property of the editor (notepad), not windows.

Ideally, you should still save the files as UTF-8, but select the option where no "Byte Order Mark (BOM)" is added.

aaronmchale’s picture

aaronmchale
Primary language English
Location Edinburgh, Scotland
commented

Not just not pad, although Windows doesn't recognize the characters, so harder to spot.

Aaron

heine’s picture

heine commented

No editor that understands UTF-8 will ever show the BOM. You'd need a hex-editor to see it.

sttranik’s picture

sttranik commented

notepad++

a simple enough, but very powerful in features.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

http://g4dd.mavimo.org/ adds Drupal snippets and automation to Gedit.