Sunday, 8 January 2012

File Editors

Developers spend much of their time in an IDE such as Eclipse or Visual Studio. But every now and then you need to view/edit something outside of this environment. So this posting covers some of my favourite free editors for various circumstances.

I’m not saying that I have conducted a comprehensive review of available software: just highlighting what I have found useful myself.

I will cover graphics editors in a future posting.

Text Editors
Once upon a time, I relied on the “Programmer’s File Editor” (PFE)  I can’t remember exactly why I moved away from it (although the fact that the web page was “Last updated February 1 1999” might give an indication).

I switched to jEdit for a while but I found the load times to be excessive (when you just want to view/edit a file quickly). It is cross-platform and has lots of features.

Now I use the “Crimson Editor”.

It is simple, fast and powerful and gets the job done. Here are a list of features.

Hex Editors
Every now and then you need to see (and possible change) the contents of a file in hex.

Once upon a time, I relied on XVI32.

Again I can’t quite remember the reason for the changeover, but now I use HxD.

Again it’s simple to use and it gets the job done.

XML Editors
Some day I must perform an evaluation of available XML Editors.

Some day my needs may be such that I will be able to justify the purchase of Altiva’s XMLSpy.

In the meantime I use Microsoft XML Notepad 2007.

I note, however, that Wikipedia says that it "has been criticized for crashing frequently". So buyer beware (or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that "you get what you pay for"!).