lofton.net

Well, jedit is just being a pain with the ftp and my server. Something about my host just gives jedit fits. It works fine with any other server I’ve worked on, so I know it is my hosting provider’s configuration. The short story is it repeatedly fails to connect. It will connect and then it will fail. I can retry to open or save whatever it was I was trying to do 10, 20 or more times and then it will work once or twice.

So I am back to looking as I have been doing a lot of coding on the server lately (more on that in another post sometime in the future). I really like the look and feel of Coda from Panic software. It costs $79 though… And for an editor, I just can’t bring myself to pay that yet. I was trying Simultron, Taco and a few others. None of them have integrated FTP. I was also trying skEdit, but that too costs money. Although it is less than Coda.

All of them are decent editors, except I sometimes have special editing needs. This includes multiline search with regular expressions and vertical/column selection. A coworker mentioned TextWrangler and I just downloaded that. Based on BBEdit which is a really powerful editor, TextWrangler seems like it may fit my needs. First it is free (BBEdit has a cost, but worth it if you edit a lot). It has FTP integrated and after running a few tests seems to handle my hosting provider’s flaky ftp.

I have owned/paid for previous versions of BBEdit, but I gave it up as it also was affected by the flaky FTP, and there was a problem of another kind… It would only allow opening one file at a time via FTP. I also got tired of paying for an upgrade to a text editor. While I do code a lot from time to time it is not justifiable expense anymore.

It seems that they improved FTP in TextWrangler and you can now open multiple files at one time in FTP. One problem is you still have to open a separate window every time you want to access something from the FTP connection, but as long as it works and I can get multiple files open that may be acceptable for now. Other features I really love are vertical selection, multiline search and replace as well as regular expressions. So all in all it looks very good for my infrequent coding need. However, that may change soon and now I may go back to get a license for the new BBEdit or possibly Coda.

[postscript] I have started working with a sourceforge project and jEdit works just fine there. So it is still my editor of choice. TextWrangler makes a nice addition, and works with my personal server.