Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is a free version of the editing portion of ActiveState's US$295 IDE. It's got a lot of text-manipulation capabilities that a programmer would want, such as indenting, joining lines, changing case, commenting a highlighted block and -- one of my favorites -- jumping to a matching brace (I occasionally lose track of my open and close brackets when trying to create complex conditionals).

Even if you don't have the debugging and other tools of the full-blown IDE development environment, Komodo Edit 4.1 is a nice application for writing code. It's got colored syntax for a slew of options ranging from CSS and HTML to Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and more. It will suggest tagging and autocompletions based on the context of commands you are entering (using Tab or Enter accepts the choice on a drop-down menu).

You can create macros by recording keystrokes, "snippets" that can accept user input or put code before and after highlighted text, templates for new files and more. You can connect to a remote server via FTP and edit files in Komodo. And, as with an IDE, you can group files in a project.

The UI is sleek, and while all features aren't necessarily intuitive, you can start using Komodo Edit at a basic level right away, and then turn to the manual as you decide you want more customization features. In fact, Komodo Edit has just about everything I look for in an editor except spell check.

I subsequently purchased the US$295 Komodo IDE (or, more accurately, talked my boss into purchasing it for me at work) and find it a great piece of software for development work.

Komodo Edit ratings (on a scale of 1 to 10):

Ease of learning and use: 8

Look and feel: 9

Content editing (spell check, search/replace, etc.): 7

Simple HTML editing (bold, line breaks, ordered lists, etc.): 9

Customization (macro power, ease of creating): 10

Total: 43