The right tools for the job ..
Friday, December 3rd, 2010If you’re doing any development, you need a set of tools that helps you finish the task at hand. For a webcoder, a syntax-highlighting editor is a must. If indentation is built in and configurable as well, that helps too.
I’ve myself used jEdit (http://www.jedit.org) for years and years and years, because not only does it do everything i want it to, there’s also an almost perverse number of plugins that does everything, from chatting on irc, playing tic-tac-toe and everything else you can think of. Plus it’s free and multi-platform.
Last few months it’s felt like jEdit has gotten a bit slow on my machine, so i figured I would try out some other applications. I’ve tried about 9 or 10 or perhaps even eleven, but I only have two editors left on the system (besides jEdit).
First up is intype. Intype is ridiculously fast on my machine not to mention the fact that it looks real good. It also has an awesome feature called “Bundles” which basically means you start typing the first part of your block, hit the tab and intype finishes the block and you fill in the details. I haven’t gotten used to it yet, but in the long run I think it’s going to save a lot of time … intype is free for the time being, but the developers have been open about it having a price when it leaves the beta stage.
After intype, i found an awesome little program called “Bend”. There has been ridiculous rumors floating around that this is a product from Microsoft, but that’s not true. Below is an image of the settings screen, which animates into view when invoked.
The editor itself is quite minimalistic, loads decently fast and is a total pleasure to work with. The system for keeping track of open tabs could be better, but in the grand general scheme of everything, it rocks.
Bend has sadly disappeared of the face of the planet, website deleted and noone saved down the source, so we’re all anxiously waiting to hear from the original author. I’ve managed to find a zipped install though, that i’ll share with you.
Visit intype HERE and download intype HERE
