Textmate on Windows

For months I’ve been on the windows-based text-editor trail. To no avail I’ve finally run into a great product. While this product is commercial, its very much in beta. Welcome to E. I never thought I’d ever see an editor like this hit the streets.

E is a collaborative text editor taylored for the windows platform. While there are plans for *nix versions, windows is the only platform it runs on.

If you want to get your hands on this editor, just simply head over to www.e-texteditor.com.

An Intergrated Development Environment Gets in the Way

I’ve been developing websites for quite some time. In that time I have grown accustomed to the likes of Dreamweaver and Golive for designing and publishing my web projects. While these IDE’s are great for what they accomplish, I always felt frustrated and hindered.

Overtime I began to cut back on the features required to get the job done. I realized that a boat load of features didn’t really help improve anything. As of late I’m back to the basics, a simple text editor. Its interesting as your career progresses you end up needing less to accomplish the same tasks.

Welcome to E

When I heard about this apparent Textmate port to windows, I was ecstatic yet skeptical. There were a lot of things that I’ve come to expect especially in the breath of comparisons to textmate. Needless to say my expectations were somewhat met.

Using E

The user interface is simply elegant and this alone lets you get straight to coding. While I’ve grown use to having 20+ toolbar icons staring at me daily, I certainly don’t miss them.

Using E was fairly effortless. However, the beta at the time was lacking and very buggy. Syntax coloring was a bit skiddish. Overall this editor was destined to be great with rough edges. Aside from all the problems, I still got things done.

E touts a strong adherence to collaboration and sharing code. In E you can set milestones and see updates by other developers as they happen. Code and syntax coloring is a joy to modify as well. Having been a user of jEdit (yet another text editor) I found E’s ability color my syntax refreshingly flexible.

Project management is dead simple. Open a directory as a project and go to it. The whole idea of E is to bring a light weight effective editor to table. Sure their is a liscense requirement to continue using it but don’t fret. The developers of E have made it free until its out of beta.

In part two of this series I will be touching on bundles and code snippets/abbreviations.