Note: This is more of a web-programming rant than anything game related. Sorry.

Why is it that nobody’s made one program to serve as an all-purpose multi-language web editor? You’d think there would be tons of these programs out there, since everyone would want one, but I can’t find any (for free anyway, maybe that’s why).

Let’s start with the first editor I used (besides HotDog Professional), which was CoffeeCup HTML Editor. It worked great as an HTML Editor until version 9.0, which for some reason broke a bunch of things that were never fixed. It was very good with highlighting Javascript and CSS, but has serious issues when dealing with PHP. And by issues I mean the entire page loses its syntax highlighting and CC thinks that it’s all Javascript. So I haven’t used that for a while, except a few standalone .js files.

After I began migrating away from CoffeeCup, I tried PHP Editor (creative name, I know). It had great support for PHP, and I still use it occasionally. Despite this, it only had meh support for HTML, Javascript, and CSS. It could do some syntax highlighting, but it still wasn’t great. Although it’s the second best in the list I’m giving here.

So far my favorite editor would be Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting for everything except <style> tags, and that’s what I’ve been using for everything lately. My issue with this one is that it’s trying to be too much. It doesn’t have features I’d really want like syntax suggestion, but instead supports 20+ languages. I’d rather have a specialized editor than this one.

I’ve heard good things about Aptana Studio, so I figured I’d download that one. It went really well, and its feature list looked really good, but then I found out it doesn’t support PHP at all! What’s worse is, version 1.5 did and the current version doesn’t. So after I spend all this time working to get the program running on my system, I find out it’s no better than CoffeeCup. Blah…

You’ve probably heard me praising FlashDevelop for its Actionscript editing. Let me say, this is the best program I’ve ever worked with for programming. I love its AS3 interface, it almost makes me forget how bad the language itself is. So I tried using it as an web editor. And while it does provide synax highlighting, it doesn’t have nearly as many good things as it did for the AS3 section. It wasn’t designed to be a web editor, and so I haven’t used it as one.

…and that’s basically where I am now. I’ve tried almost all the free editors on the web, and I’m not satisfied with any of them. Is there someone I’m missing, that is the heavenly program I’m looking for? I really hope so, if not I’m going to start building my own…