E TextEditor - Good enough to abandon Dreamweaver?
Over the years, I’ve used several different editors to build websites, ranging from MS-DOS’s Edit, to Netscape Composer, to (horror of horrors!) MS FrontPage. But most of that was before I was doing anything serious with the web. For true seriosity, I’ve used Dreamweaver almost exclusively.
But recently I’ve begun using E - TextEditor for more of my work. It hasn’t replaced Dreamweaver yet, but it makes the thought tempting.
Lightweight
E is a lightweight text editor for Windows. The first way in which I noticed its lightweightness was the load time. Opening Dreamweaver had never bothered me, but opening E is so much faster, that I’ve now become impatient with it.
I also noticed E’s lightweight feel in the fact that it lacks Dreamweaver’s plethora of panels. At first, this left me a little disoriented, but once I got used to it, I began to enjoy the simplicity of simply interacting with the code directly and the clean uncluttered feeling of the interface.
One of my favorite features of E is that, unlike Dreamweaver, I can open any directory as a project without having to go through any project setup screens. Just click File, Open Dir as project, and there it is.
Intuitive
E’s interface is for the most part highly intuitive. Like most applications, it uses tabs for multiple documents, but its tabs use a style more reminiscent of FireFox than MS Office, which makes me, at least, much more likely to use them instead of opening one document at a time.
Speaking of tabs, when you close E, you don’t lose the selection of documents that you had open. The next time you run the program, you’ll find everything just the way you left it. This is very handy if you tend to work on just one or two projects at a time. You don’t have to go to the trouble of finding and reopening the relevant files.
Advanced Features
Despite its lightweight feel and clean interface (or maybe because of them), E is a powerful editor with some very advanced features like version control. When you’re working on a document, you can commit “milestones,” which are a way of saving the current state without having to keep different versions of the same document around. E lets you roll back your changes to any previous milestone, so you never have to worry about losing everything again.
E also supports TextMate bundles, which give added functionality to the editor. Some bundles are built specially for HTML some for Python, etc., giving you shortcuts for common tasks in your chosen field of work (like choosing a doctype).
Downsides
Despite all of this, there are some downsides. The primary complaint among users is the lack of a Dreamweaver style FTP client. But it seems to me that the only way to make that work would be to require Dreamweaver style project setup instead of E’s ad hoc way of working with directories.
The real downside is for those who tend to work in Dreamweaver’s WYSWIG interface a lot. E is a text editor, not a visual HTML editor. Indeed, it’s not even specifically intended for HTML & CSS. So unless you do more than 90% of your work in code view, it probably isn’t right for you.
But if you do work primarily with code, E might be just the thing for you. It’s only $34.95, and you can download a free trial from the website.
Update: Apparently, E now supports FTP!
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I actually downloaded E TextEditor last week to give is a trial run. I guess my impression of it was that it was so-so. I wasn’t overly impressed with it to be honest, but it wasn’t bad either. I currently use Edit+ and it is super lightweight, only 2.5MB install I believe. Edit+ has everything that I like and use too. One main feature that I love Edit+ for is the ability to edit HTML/CSS and then simply hit Ctrl+B and it will save the document for me and then open my changes in my default web browser. I love this feature because I’m obsessive compulsive when I code. Every single change I make, I have to check to make sure it didn’t break something else. I’m not the type that will develop a whole layout before looking at it, so this shortcut for checking my changes is wonderful. Unless I’m mistaken, E TextEditor didn’t have this functionality? I also took a test drive of NotePad++ the other day and it was really good too. I probably liked it a little more than E TextEditor although I think they have a lot of the same features as far as being able to collapse code and stuff. There again, NotePad++ doesn’t have the short cut keys to pop open a web browser and view your changes. I would have to save the document, open it in the web browser and then hit F5 when I wanted to view changes. Not really hard to do I know, but I’m just so used to clicking Ctrl+B that it would be hard to change.
Deron, I think the real strength of E is that it is compatible with TextMate bundles, so if you want to add some functionality to the editor, there is more than likely someone who’s already written a bundle for it. For instance, there are shortcuts for web page previews and refreshes available in the HTML bundle that comes packaged with E.
I’ll admit that I don’t use those much at the moment, however, as I’ve been mostly working with Wordpress and Shopify, and they can’t be previewed with any editor I’ve worked with so far.
Just as a follow-up, I’ve been using NotePad++ and love it. I’ve actually figured out how to change all the shortcut keys to something that I’m used to and all is well in the neighborhood.
I never even saw information about the bundles for E. I guess I overlooked that info.
Yeah, as far as working with a CMS, I know what you mean. I usually design locally first and then transfer over to ExpressionEngine, which cannot be viewed either unless you save changes and view it live. It’s a great system though and I’m not worried about it to much.
[…] are you could have avoided it if you’d been using an editor with code highlighting (such as E - TextEditor) instead of editing in a content management system’s non-highlighted stylesheet […]