For quite some time, I’ve been recommending to my members a free source code editor called PSPad. Powerful, easy to use, and flexible (I especially like its long line editing – ideal for mySQL files – and its regular expression search and replace).

However, last week I tried a new editor, called Notepad++, found at SourceForge.

Why the fuss about editors? If you’re into source code twiddling, you know that Windows Notepad lacks for anything but a quick change – and word processors try to adjust the text in ways guaranteed to break the code. So a source code editor is a must.

But there’s more – for example, syntax highlighting, where the keywords in PHP (or other computer languages) are highlighted. Another is easy help info: one editor I use will show me the PHP help files with an F1 key press, opened to the keyword my cursor was left on.

But Notepad++ takes this further than most of my editors do, with function collapsing. I can double click on any function to hide it, and double click to open it again. I can also see exactly where code matches up. It works for {} pairs as well, so I can easily figure out which ‘{‘ matches which ‘}’ in the code – VERY important with WordPress themes, which are a mess of CSS, HTML, and PHP. Another is word completion, handy for the very idiosyncratic PHP function names.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg as it were; but I was so impressed by just these features that I’m slowly training myself to use it instead of PSPad. I won’t give the old one up too soon, but the extra power in Notepad++ means faster coding – and THAT’S a great reason to use any editor.