While I am in favour of writing HTML pages by hand, certain groups on the internet annoy me a lot. These are the ones that advocate using plain text editors, such as Notepad, to code HTML pages instead of tools designed for the job. In my opinion, this is a very bad way to code pages.
The most important part of a code editor for me is the ability of the editor to provide an integrated development enviroment. This was noteably useful on my recent web service project, where there was an excess of thirty classes, namespaces and methods. While it is possible to remember the place of a specific method in the specific file when you’re working on something all day, I had to vary my time between three project, so remembering what I had done, let alone where everything was, was tedious. This is where the object browser in Visual Studio .NET came into it’s own. A single double click took me to the revelant section, and at a glace I can see the structure of the entire project.
After working on my LiveJournal K2 port in S2 style system, I immedialy felt the lack of a real IDE for S2. I spent nearly as much time trawling through the code looking for something as I did coding it. This isn’t helped by the complexity of a LiveJournal S2 style. If anyone knows of an S2 editor, please comment.
I myself am tempted to start a Kill Notepad campaign, but I then realised that I also use Notepad (mainly for quick and dirty CSS edits because I can’t be bothered to start up Dreamweaver), so unless anyone else has strong feelings against Notepad I think I’ll let it live, for now.
17 Comments
Use Crimson Editor. 100000000X better than notepad. I use it for all my coding!
I use notepad because it gives me a deeper understanding of HTML and CSS. It’s also free (legally…). It loads quicker and it’s hard core!
NOTEPAD REVOLUTION!
But Stevie, the whole point about using an IDE is that it gives you a more detailed and thorough understanding of the code. Did I specify anywhere to use WYSIWYG editors? Notepad has no tab handling, syntax highlighting, code folding etc. Also technically, Notepad isn’t free as it’s included in the Windows package.
I probably should’ve included that in my post.
But then surely you need a Windows/Mac OS platform to use your IDEs…?
True, but I never said they were free (infact, they usually cost a bomb, unless you qualify for the educational discount). The truely free solution would be to use Eclipse on a free Linux distro.
Nevertheless, the old saying of you get what you pay for is extremely true for Visual Studio .NET and Dreamweaver, and if you’re serious about developing, then you have to fork it out.
Notepad all the way. I’m not going into it now, but your idea to kill it is just silly. I’m sure there are more people than just me and Stevie that share this opinion: http://www.notepad.org/ :P
I’m not implying to kill it for every use, I use it almost daily for quick hacking and storing random bits of text. What I’m saying is, is that using notepad to code sites is very early nineties, you might as well be using vi in Unix without a GUI!
I wandered over from BinaryBonsai, looking at your Kubrick and K2 ports, but I saw this post and I had to comment…because I too am a non fan of Notepad. Wordpad’s nice though, if only for the simple fact you can undo more than one thing. But I pretty much steer clear of Notepad as much as possible.
Oh dear - we’re talking like the early nineties like old people. But Notepad does the job - you’d need to be plain stupid not to be able to use it. Its Help file is so small its negligible (that little can go wrong). And another thing: if you wanted to change something on your website - such as correcting an annoying spelling mistake - but you were on someone else’s computer, you can be damned sure that if it’s on the Windows platform, it will have Notepad, if nothing else.
I never said that using Notepad for making small changes is defunct. Infact, I mention in the article that I regularly use Notepad to make small changes to CSS files and such. However, it’s the lack of structure, and work flow by using plain text editors that really bugs me. And I’m not singling out Notepad either, it’s any plain text editor (although Notepad, along with Vi, are probably the worst offenders), although Emacs offends less due to its integration with compilers, code colouring and formatting.
Now, if someone wrote a mod for Notepad to give it code colouring, proper tab indentation and work flow controls, then I’d be all for Notepad (actually, I’d still be for other tools designed specifically for the purpose).
Back to my original intention of the article, is that advocating against using tools designed for a specific job is ludicrous, and even more ludicrous is looking at the sites designed using Notepad and seeing how dated and poor the design (and content) is.
What’s wrong with vi/vim? Has syntax highlighting and auto-indenting IIRC, some people are never happy! lol
The fact that it might be the most unfriendly text editor ever made? Infact, it does’t even have a interface!?!
Yeah, you type a colon then your command, I to insert text, / or ? to search, its actually packed with features, they just aren’t in a nice pretty menu. As linux text editors go it rules the roost :)
I think I’ll stick with Emacs, or XEmacs which is more graphical :D.
And Notepad has a nice little icon!
Notepad is undesireable because it lacks some of the features of a full-fledged IDE. Such as auto-indenting text. It also is a Windows text editor. Personally, I’ll take VI over notepad any day.
But, in my humble oppinion, I’ll use KWrite over most other editors for web design. It has syntax highlighting (which typically speeds development up because it parses the text as you type and shows some syntaxtual errors), auto-indent, and is very light. And it weighs in at only 6.2K on Gentoo. Compare that to 50Kb for Notepad on Windows.
Anyways, I digress.
I still swear by Dreamweaver for all my HTML development. In fact, I usually design a page layout in Dreamweaver first, debug that, then I move it to Visual Studio 2005, which I find is nowhere near as good as Dreamweaver. However I’m quite excited to see what the new Microsoft web and UI design tools are going to offer us.
Either way, I find an IDE to be much more productive enviroment then a plain text editor. This is the 20th century after all.