Text editors

Text editors are everywhere and useful for quick changes to text files. No text editor fits every requirement. Here is the inside view of several useful editors.

Bluefish

Fast to start. Fast to edit. Fast to open all the files in a directory. Read more in Bluefish.

Abiword

Fast to start, fast to edit then save as text instead of a word processing file. Abiword is a viable alternative when you perform word processing more often than text editing. You get good spell checking but not formatting for programming languages. I often use Abiword for taking notes that will become documentation in situations where the final documentation format is unknown.

Eclipse

Eclipse is overkill for a text editor. Eclipse tries to be a total development environment and requires an endless supply of add-on modules to achieve total coverage. By then your computer is swamped with Eclipse and Java. Netbeans is a slightly lighter weight application for PHP work and Bluefish kills both for speed. Read more about Eclipse in Eclipse and PHP.

Netbeans

If you want most, but not all, of the Eclipse features, look at Netbeans. The Netbeans PHP configuration is half the size of the Eclipse PHP configuration and on a very fast computer is almost usable as a text editor. When you use an Ultrabook, where you start the computer perhaps only once per week and suspend the computer in between uses, and you have many gigabytes of memory, Netbeans is a practical editor for a mixture of text and programming. Of all my computers, only my little netbook struggles with the minimal Netbeans PHP configuration. Netbeans slows down some of my other computers when Netbeans is installed with all options.

Sublime

if you have US$59 to spend on a text editor, visit www.sublimetext.com. Almost everything in Sublime is in Bluefish. I have not found a reason to buy Sublime.

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XML editors overlap with text editors.

Top text editors lists editors recommended by people who use text editors every day. your requirements may match one of theirs.