Can anyone please recommend a free Windows text editor? I'm running Vista and notepad is to basic for me. An editor that supports syntax highlighting for various programming languages would be OK. Also running on Linux would be a plus as well, but not absolutely neccessary.

TIA Jed

Can anyone please recommend a free Windows text editor? I'm running Vista and notepad is to basic for me. An editor that supports syntax highlighting for various programming languages would be OK. Also running on Linux would be a plus as well, but not absolutely neccessary.

TIA Jed

Scintilla (Scite).

What else? :

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

And:

http://www.distasis.com/cpp/scitetip.htm

jaclaz

Thanks jaclaz.

I'll take a look at those ASAP.

Jed

Notepad++ isn't too bad (don't know what kind of syntax hilite you want...). Links to Linux versions....

Scintilla (Scite).

What else? :

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

For syntax highlighting, SciTE supports a lot of languages:

# Define the Lexer menu,
# Each item contains three parts: menu string | file extension | key
# The only keys allowed currently are based on F-keys and alphabetic keys and look like
# [Ctrl+][Shift+][Fn|a] such as F12 or Ctrl+Shift+D.
# A '&' may be placed before a letter to be used as an accelerator. This does not work on GTK+.
menu.language=\
#FreeBasic|bas||\
Text|txt|Shift+F11|\
#Ada|ads||\
AutoIt3|au3|Shift+F12|\
#Apache Confi&g|conf||\
#Assembler|asm||\
#ASN.1|asn1||\
#Avenue|ave||\
#Baan|bc||\
&Batch|bat||\
#Bullant|ant||\
#&C / C++|cpp||\
#CMake|cmake||\
#C|cs||\
#Csound|orc||\
CSS|css||\
#D|d||\
&Difference|diff||\
#&Eiffel|e||\
#Erlang|erl||\
#&Errorlist|err||\
#FlagShip|prg||\
#&Fortran|f90||\
#Gap|g||\
#H&ypertext|html||\
#&InnoSetup|iss||\
#&Java|java||\
#Java&Script|js||\
#&Kix|kix||\
#TeX|tex||\
#Lisp|lisp||\
#Lot|lot||\
#Lout|lt||\
Lu&a|lua||\
#Matlab|m.matlab||\
#&Makefile|mak||\
#MetaPost|mp||\
#MMIXAL|mms||\
#&nnCron crontab|tab||\
#NSIS|nsis||\
#Objective Caml|ml||\
#Octave|m.octave||\
#Opal|impl||\
#Pascal|pas||\
#Pe&rl|pl||\
#P&HP|php||\
#P&LSQL|spec||\
&Properties|properties||\
#P&ostScript|ps||\
#P&OV-Ray SDL|pov||\
#Pytho&n|py||\
#Reso&urce|rc||\
#Ruby|rb||\
#Shell|sh||\
#S&QL|sql||\
#Specman|e||\
#&TCL|tcl||\
#&VB|vb||\
#VBScr&ipt|vbs||\
#Verilog|v||\
#VHDL|vhd||\
#&XML|xml||\
#&YAML|yaml||

The # means it is commented out. This is located in the SciTEGlobal.properties file. I had to edit mine (on another PC) when I wanted to use SciTE for website editing, but my UltraEdit key couldn't be used because I already have it installed at home.

I like Geany. It looks and feels much like the old Dev-C++ IDE.

http://www.geany.org

Why not vi ?

Another vote for Notepad++! It's lightweight, it has tabs, syntax highlighting, code folding, auto updates, many useful plugins, auto-completion (a bit like intellisense in VS -- just hit ctrl+space or ctrl+enter), vertical dotted lines with the indentation (curly braces), nice keyboard shortcuts for a lot of useful stuff (like Ctrl+K to comment out stuff, which is similar to ctrl+k + ctrl+c combo in VS, find in files and much, much more. IMO it totally pwnz SciTE.

Edit: HippoEDIT and E-TextEditor are also worth a shot (newer offerings)

Some people think that Notepad++ is "heavier" than they want to load every time, and prefer Notepad2 or one of the mods for it since it is very light weight. The free version of Edit Pad is also nice, but I personally use the paid version, Edit Pad Pro.

Cheers and Regards

And let's not forget you can set it up to run a compiler on the file you have loaded, too.

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I think I will take a look at Notepad++ as it seems to be quite a decent editor for my needs!

Possibly Geany as well.

Jed

Edit: Notepad installed and working nicely from npp.5.9.4.Installer.exe

Edited October 22, 201114 yr by JedClampett

Why not vi ?

I dumped that in 1990 after finishing my HNC in commercial data processing. I think it ran on a VaX - not the hoover, but a server feeding 12 or more BSD UNIX workstations. IIRC the 286 AT PC's were running Windows 3.x and Microfocus COBOL workbench was the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Jed

But there is Winvi too :

http://www.winvi.de/en/

jaclaz

Ccy Text Editor

http://www.ccyjchk.com/catalog/text_editor.php

"Syntax highlighting for contents of Html, XML, C++, CSS, Delphi, Java, Fortran, Foxpro, Java, Javascript, KIX32, Perl, PHP, XQL, Pascal, Visual Basic, Assembly and Initial files. Can read Rich Text Format rtf files."

btw ...

Cream (incl. Vim) by Steve Hall http://cream.sourceforge.net/download.html (WIN32 + LNX ) ca. 7,5 MB

PSPad by Jan Fiala CZ http://www.pspad.com/en/pspad.htm (WIN32) ca. 4,2 MB

ConTEXT by ConTEXT Project Ltd UK http://www.contexteditor.org/features (WIN32) ca. 2 MB

http://www.contexteditor.org/highlighters

HiEditor by Antonis Kyprianou GR http://www.winasm.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=2156 (WIN32)

Ultra fast Large File Text Editor with syntax highlight for programmers http://icfu.totalcmd.net/Tools/HiEditor.zip (62 KB) ^^

Edited October 31, 201114 yr by e-t-c