Originally published on: 3/11/2007 6:46:28 PM
ActiveState (if you've done any Perl on Windows, you've bumped into these guys) have had an IDE product for a while, priced in that $300 range. A couple of weeks ago, I got a product announcement that they'd released a free programmer's text editor, with the typical goodies: syntax highlighting, autocomplete, custom keybindings, all the "normal" stuff.
Komodo Edit has support (including auto-complete for most) for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django out f the box. The auto-complete works much better out of the box for PHP here than in many of the other options. Theoretically, there can be lots of other support added as well. That's because Komodo Edit is written in XUL (like Firefox and Thunderbird) and it can be extended just like those other platforms: with Javascript and XML. There aren't many extensions yet, but that's the case with any new platform, so I'll be watching for developments in that area.
Overall, I think they struck a nice balance of features in the free editor vs. the $295 full IDE. You can see a comparison of the feature differences, but it basically boils down to things like a full debugger, regular expression toolkit, and a code browser. They're the kind of features that most individual developers can do without. And, if you *do* need them, you are probably in a position to justify the price tag.
Definitely worth a look, especially if you don't want to fiddle with settings to get lots of good functionality. Besides, it's free. So, if you don't like it, delete it and move on.
So for someone who is allergic to both Vi and Emacs variants where do I find a decent cross platform text editor. Note I have tried Jedit which is currently my number one contender but for various reasons I just haven't been able to Jell with it.
http://www.andhapp.com/blog/Future_is_bright_Future_is_ETextEditor/33
I thought it was free, but apparently it isn't. I'm trying to install the latest beta now.
The 3 I'm currently flipping between are: ScITE, jEdit and now Komodo.
@kongmeng: Yep. vi and emacs always come up in these conversations. However, neither one matches my way of working and I'm not willing to spend 2 weeks getting nothing done for the sake of being able to wear the "I use vi" badge.
The 3 I'm using are a nice hybrid of keyboard/mouse functionality where, if you know the keyboard shortcut, things go faster, but you can stumble your way through using the mouse.
@evanx: Yep, jEdit is one of the others that I toggle between. I have taken a quick peek at the new Netbeans, but haven't looked enough to be able to weigh in.
There's also Eclipse, but it always takes too long to get it configured for anything other than Java.
To me, the ideal editor is one that lets me get work done on the first day it's installed, without slowing me down. Then, as the days go by and I figure more stuff out, I can speed up.
Anything that makes me take a productivity hit for even a day is probably going to get tossed aside.