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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Tools of the trade, on the go of course

There are a couple of things that programmers cling to like rabid dogs when it comes to the way they work (no I'm not going to talk about coffee brands). One of these is their choice of text editor. I don't mean the full blown IDE they work in (though some do choose to just edit random bits of text in those as well), I mean the lightweight application they use to edit the odd script or batch file, as a secondary clipboard and for other such necessities. There are many contenders out there, and for many years my product of choice was TextPad, largely due to it's excellent macro support, command result capturing and pre-bundled integration with Java (which I was using extensively at the time).

SciteAndLuaHowever last year I was slowly won over by a friend's editor of choice, Scite. It's command support trumped TextPad's, and while TextPad stubbornly refused to give in to our attempts to make it properly portable, Scite handles such mangling quite admirably. Admittedly TextPad still wins out on bulk processing of text files due to it's macro support, but that is hardly an everyday occurrence.

Sometime between then and now, PortableApps rolled their own version of Scite, so when I went looking to update my aging version of the editor I was saved the minimal pain of portabalizing it myself. Some nice little features have been added to the editor as well, such as code folding. What's more is that Scite now easily supports Lua scripting within the editor (though a minor tweak to the lua properties file for the portable version is required). Since we use lua extensively in my current project this is a huge bonus. The entire portable 'installation' of Scite, including the required lua executables, is under 2.5MB, so it's suitable for pretty much any portable device in use today.

If your text editor of choice is starting to get a bit bulky, and outliving it's usefulness, give this awesome little editor a try.

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