Editors

Radsoft's product line has about a zillion editors, and mostly it's these editors we use, but we've tried most of the well known editors out there, and we do have a favorite.

Today editors are used for a lot more than editing program source code: they're used widely for editing HTML. Which has given rise to a whole new category of editors, such as Homesite, Coffee Cup, and the like.

WYSIWYG HTML

Get It Try It

There was a time when we believed this would happen; there was a time when we believed we would be the first; but something happened and today the possibility of true HTML WYSIWYG seems rather slim. For a while some version of Windows was shipping with an HTML-enhanced rich edit DLL, and we did succeed in modifying one of our own RTF editors to output HTML instead, but everything came out on a single line and made further detailed work rather difficult.

Then something happened - we can't quite remember what - and suddenly this DLL was not working right anymore. Either Microsoft decided they didn't want the HTML enhancements on the market, or we flubbed up, or both. But even with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, you're not going to ever get the kind of optimal code you can get with a text editor; such an HTML editor can never know what you're up to. It's a bit like expecting a code optimizer to be a mind reader. So the ultimate HTML editor is still 'Notepad' - or one of its infamous replacements.

Notepad Replacements

When it comes to authentic Notepad replacements, we've more or less got the market rounded up (literally); it's fun sometimes to see new products listings, where you can read, 'Notepad replacement (5MB)'. Notepad is a program under 50KB on disk, and it's old. Anything over that size is definitely not a Notepad replacement.

We tend to stick with simple editors, and we definitely like our own arsenal best, because we don't generally like IDEs. There's nothing like using a file system browser for navigating around a disk - the Open file dialog is just nothing in comparison. We like to double click files quick and open them all over the place. That's the way we work.

A lot of our editors are still available for free on the net. Try looking for our 'Core' package at Beverly Hills: it should still have Rixedit in it. Rixedit is a minimal RTF/text editor. It doesn't do anything fancy, but it does do what it's supposed to do well.

HTML Editors

Most of our web work is done with two of our own products: X-edit and X-sed. X-sed is very handy for making global changes. We wrote it, so we know exactly how it works. The first thing we do before dropping a zillion files on X-sed is check that the string we want to change is found only where it's supposed to be found: in other words, the first drop is 'idempotent' - we change the string to itself. If the tally X-sed displays after the drop is right, then we go for the real change. This is great for global major changes to a zillion HTML files all at once. X-sed handles strings of up to 30,000 characters, so we could basically change complete HTML files if we wanted to!

X-edit is about the nicest low-calorie editor we've got, and it's the best one suited for HTML too. It's based on the 1st generation rich edit control from Microsoft, the one that allows line lengths of over a million characters, and we've tweaked our X-edit to handle files of almost any size too. But the 1st generation rich edit control from Microsoft can only handle one level of undo, and this can become a pain in the long run when editing HTML.

Edit Plus 2

Of all the HTML and other editors out there that we've tried - Coffee Cup, Homesite, things from IBM, NetObjects, PFE, TextPad, et al., et al., et al. - there is only one that stands out as far as we are concerned. Edit Plus 2 is a 'Korean' product as best we can determine; it's an MFC app too, which normally would set off warning lights everywhere; but it's incredibly well written, loads almost instantaneously, and doesn't muck about with things on install and ordinary use like other programs.

As far as editing HTML - it's got the works, as far as we're concerned that is. We really recommend you try this one out. Our take is that this is a 'beautiful product'. We're not getting paid to say this; we don't even know the people who run the Edit Plus 2 show; we just like their program and very rarely like any program this much. For us, Edit Plus 2 is indispensable.

You can find Edit Plus 2 at http://editplus.com, and you can download Edit Plus 2 at Beverly Hills.