h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone know of a good free text editor with auto indent and syntax highlighting for the win32 platform.

It would be great if it recognised the syntax of python and I'm playing with that language.

I think the program you seek is "PFE" (Programmer's File Editor) - hang on a sec. while I go Google for it...

It's no longer in development, but the Windows version is archived at Simtel: http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/11983.shtml

I used it a few years back. It allows indenting and syntax highlighting for a range of languages, and I think you can provide your own language rule files for languages which weren't around when it was being developed, or that the author didn't think to include. Enjoy.

for what I know PFE dosn' do santax hilighting, Vim does, so does xEmacs and you can get both for windows.

-- DoctorMO --

PFE *does* highlight syntax, if you tell it to. It just doesn't do it by default.

All this time... well I've scoured the options, were is it?

-- DoctorMO --

I'll have to install it to remind myself; it's over two years since I last used it in at my old job... (I had it set up to highlight and indent Javascript)

Hmm. I found the "language Awareness" options under "Mode Groups" (you have to create a new mode group for the options to be enabled)... But the version I just installed only has language options for C and TeX...

I can only assume that my old work had a different version, or that there's a way to add rules for other languages. It was already installed and set up on my machine when I started working there...

I'll investigate further after lunch.

Ah right I see. so it's alot more powerfull that I fist imagened.

-- DoctorMO --

emacs is a classic, nice but the learning curve is a bit steep... it does however understand pretty much every language you're likely to be interested in.

I *think* that when, in my last job, we had to find a replacementment for the most excellent PFE we went for UltraEdit (http://download.com.com/3000-2352-10196625.html?tag=lst-0-7) or Textpad
(http://download.com.com/3000-2352-10196626.html?tag=lst-0-8) can't rememeber which one, was just around the time I left, but both are cheapish shareware.

I also had loads of a DOS version of MultiEdit kicking around somewhere, on 5½ inch disks! But was a great freeby (now $199) was the only one at the time where you could select columns of text - great for making data sent to me in non-CSV format into CSVs.

CH

Ooooh, I've used UltraEdit too... It's very nice.

If you have bad eyesight like me, though, you need to go through and set all the default highlighting colours to half-brightness... #00FF00 green on white is pretty unreadable in a thin courier font; #007F00 is far clearer.

I didn't like UnltraEdit, although Dev-C++ does coloum selections.

-- DoctoRMO --

why would you use 007f00 instead of 008000?
i like to use powers of 2 rather than 2^n - 1
>8^B

No reason; I just chose to round down rather than up. With a "hex point" the proper value would have been 7F.8

Thanks for the suggestions . I'm going to try this one

http://www.kt2k.com/software.php?id=3

"Syntax highlighting for 24 different languages: ASP, Assembler, Batch files, c , c++ , c#, Cascading Style Sheet, Fortran Fox Pro, html, Inform, Ini format, LaTex, Pascal, Perl, php, Python, Java, Java Script, SQL, TCL/Tk, Visual Basic, VbScript, XML, Unreal Tournament."

Unreal Tournament on a list of languages?

lol
7f.8
>8^B

I have recently discovered SCiTE - and I really like it

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

I was looking for something simple and SCiTE can be as plain as Notepad - if you want

It can also, v easily, be much more

Oh, and it's FREE