Code Editor Review – Source Edit

Created 1023 days ago. Last modified 976 days ago.

Source Edit

Download size… 3.73Mb
Installation size… 3.88Mb

This is a quite powerful editor, very similar to a commercial one that I use at work (my day job… not web development). In fact, the site even has a syntax highlighter for the obscure language that I programme in at work (a first that I know of – we had to write our own for the product we use). As with some of the other products I review, this is a generic code editor, which includes compiler options amongst other things. Never-the-less everything I look at specifically have facilities for web coding.

Again, this looks a little old-fashioned, but it’s compact and quick. Line numbering can be turned on, as can word wrap but this is where I came across it’s big problem. Word wrap occurs at a set column position – by default at position 80. All the other products I use wrap to the side of the window, so if you re-size it, the word wrap changes. Indeed, there’s a further problem with the word wrap – where lines wrap onto seperate lines, they are given their own line numbers. So, in the test I used, I had a 24 line piece of code but after turning on word wrap it was 27 lines – this means that debugging code will become harder as line numbers reported by, say, PHP will not correlate unless you turn the word wrap off. I looked in the configuration but couldn’t find a way to change this – I’m sure some people prefer it this way, but I’d at least like a way of changing it.

On top of that there’s little support, or something that will do an equivalent, for launching the code in a browser – just viewing it in the default browser. A crude macro facility exists but I can’t see a way of passing the current file name into it. Maybe there is something but after the word wrapping problem, I pretty much gave up the product.

Summary

Seems quite powerful but unusual for me because of its line wrapping problems, so 3 out of 5 stars.