My Web Development Toolkit
April 20, 2006 | 4 Comments
In addition to EditPlus as my favorite text editor, there are a few other tools I rely heavily on when doing web development.
The first is a simple tool, but one of the most valuable. Pixie is a utility for picking colors from various areas of the screen. It captures the RGB, CMYK, HSV, and most importantly HTML Hex values. With a simple shortcut key you can grab this value to your clipboard. It is extremely light and unbelievably useful.
Another common task I find myself repeating is measuring areas of the screen, primarily in pixels. For this I use JRuler. Again, this is a light utility that does exactly what it should without frills or excess.
To even my own surprise I find myself jumping regularly between Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox for browsers. However, if I’m doing and Ajax or general Javascript development, Firefox is the browser of choice. With that in mind, there are some must have extensions. You absolutely must get Web Developer and Firebug. These tools can strip hours off your overall development and testing time.
Tags: editplus, firefox, internet explorer, jruler, pixie, safari, web, web developer, web development
EditPlus - The Greatest Text Editor
April 3, 2006 | 9 Comments
EditPlus is unmatched in a crowded space of desktop text editors.
This is an application which gracefully handles syntax highlighting for any imaginable programming language. Part of the strength here is in the simplicity of defining highlighting rules. They are all defined in easy to understand text files which are a breeze to modify or supplement. Of course all the common ones are built-in (C, C++, Java, Java Script, PHP, Perl, ASP, HTML, CSS, etc) but there are also a ton of user contributed languages (Maya, Quake 2, Ada, QBasic, FoxPro, LaTex, and so many more).
For those who are interested, it also supports auto-completion files in a similar manner.
Another major win is it’s ability to handle remote files through SFTP (or FTP) in such a way that they are no more difficult to work with than a local file. Other text editors try to accomplish and at least succeed at having the feature, but I’ve seen none that are as seamless to work with.
Keyboard shortcuts can be user defined, so any operation you find yourself doing regularly can quickly be mapped to your favorite keystroke. A huge win for developers.
Finally, the regular expression find and replace has made ad-hoc manipulation of text files something I can do without even thinking about it. All the fantastic abilities that surround this functionality add greatly to my comfort level with the product.
Unfortunately, I have on e criticism. There is no Mac version… This is most unfortunate to me, because EditPlus is the last reason I have for using Windows.
If you aren’t already using EditPlus, and you are on a PC, try this text editor for awhile. You won’t be sorry.
Tags: css, edit plus, editor, editplus, ide, php, regular expression, sftp, shortcut, syntax highlighting, text editor