Development using a Programmer's Editor

A programmer's editor is one which "knows" about programming languages, and in particular Java. It can offer many advantages:

• + syntax colouring can improve productivity
• + you can save the program and run the compiler by pressing a button
• + you can customise your environment to suit yourself
• + the editor can pre-load the compiler to eliminate its start-up delay for repeated compiling
• + you may be able to use the same editor with several programming languages
• + the editor can jump straight to the right line number after a compiler error
• -- you may not be able to use the same editor for all your programming languages
• -- it may not be platform independent
• -- it may need a lot of time-consuming detective work to customise

You may end up spending a huge number of hours over a lifetime using a programmer's editor, so it is an important choice. There are far too many of them, and far too few good ones, and it is very strongly a matter of personal taste, so it isn't easy to choose. The situation also changes with time, so rather than just follow the advice here, you should also type something like "programmer's editors" into Google and do some investigation of your own.

My own personal preference would be for an editor which is free and open source, which is used widely so that it is well developed, which has syntax colouring for C, Java, Haskell, HTML, XML and JSP, which is also suitable for general purpose use as well as programming, which is highly and easily customisable, which is platform independent (e.g. written in Java), and which is generally efficient and convenient.

Currently the best choice seems to jEdit which has excellent core features, though the plugins are somewhat variable.

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