BrockLi Soup

Most of the text I edit is code. It’s just part of being a web developer. Sure, I do a little writing now and again for this here blog, but I usually do that in a web browser, so most of the time I spend in text editors is for code. But, I’m working on a pretty big documentation project for work, and I’m trying out Markdown for blog posts, so I’m spending more time in a plain vanilla text editor to do both.

These are the text editors I’ve come to know and love.

Notepad

Everybody starts with Notepad. I think I wrote all of my HTML and fledgling Javascript in Notepad back in high school - Dreamweaver just felt unwieldy, and I didn’t know about any other options at the time.

UltraEdit

It’s been a long time since I’ve used UltraEdit, but it was my go-to editor for most of college. I really only used it because I could open several files in tabs - pretty standard these days, but that was the first time I’d seen it. I don’t even know what else it was capable of, because I just used it as a basic text editor.

Zend Studio

Zend Studio has been my primary IDE since I started my current job two and a half years ago. I love it because of the code completion and debugging for PHP, but I wind up using it for just about any text I need to edit quickly while I’m working because it’s always open. I also use it on my MacBook if I’m doing stuff for work.

TextMate

TextMate has been gaining ground in my workflow. It’s a pretty powerful little editor, but I barely take advantage of it. I use it all the time to edit plain text, but I almost never code in it - Zend is a far superior IDE for PHP, so it never made sense to use TextMate for it.

The real power in TextMate comes from its bundles. I just finished a project with Code Igniter (more on that in another post soon), and TextMate turned out to be a lot more useful thanks to the Code Igniter TextMate Bundle (for the record, I found a second bundle when trying to find the link to that one, but I haven’t tried it yet). I like Zend’s code completion, but I was able to develop in TextMate a lot quicker with the shortcuts provided by the bundle.

It also has a Markdown bundle, which adds some keyboard shortcuts, provides a quick cheat sheet, and makes it easy to preview while you’re writing. In fact, I’m writing this in TextMate right now.

Update: I love it even more now that I’ve watched this video about blogging in TextMate. You can post new entries and edit existing ones right in TextMate!

WriteRoom

To be honest, I haven’t actually written anything in WriteRoom, except for the couple of times I’ve played with it to tweak the font and such. Basically, it gives you a solid black screen with a narrow column of simple green text and a blinking console cursor. The colors can be customized, of course, but the point is that it gives you a stripped down, no frills, typewriter-like interface where you can write without the distraction of menus, bouncing dock icons, or IM windows. It really makes me wish I had something to write, because it just compels me to spill everything into words on the screen. I thought I might start using it with Markdown to write blog posts and stuff, but that was before I found all the shortcuts in TextMate. Still, WriteRoom just begs to be used, and I wish I had more than two days left in my trial so I could see if I can’t find a use for it.

If you don’t have iTunes installed, or haven’t signed up for the Music Store, you should do so just to get the free songs every week. They typically post two every Tuesday, and I always like one (if not both) of them.

The single this week was Munich, by Editors (the British ones - apparently there’s another band with the same name that’s causing some confusion on the iTMS). It’s very Interpol-y, and I’ve listened to it a bunch of times since I got it the other day. Go grab it - I mean, it’s free, so why not?

On the other hand, you can skip Gary Nichols, because he’s a little girl.