December 5, 2006 by tmalaher.

My editor of choice, when not using an IDE like NetBeans:

jEdit - Programmer’s Text Editor

Features:

• It’s written in Java so it’s cross platform
• It has a million plug ins that do useful things
• Free, open source.
• It has a nice XML/HTML editing mode that does “code completion” on tags and attributes, and gives you a tree view and validation error list.
• It has syntax coloring for more computer languages than you can shake a Turing Machine at.
• It can even compile and run code from within the editor, so if you don’t have an IDE, you can turn it into a poor-man’s one, or use it for languages that don’t otherwise have an IDE, like Perl.
• It can remotely edit files over [S]FTP.
• There’s CVS integration (…note to self: check for Subversion integration…)

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December 5, 2006 by tmalaher.

Here’s a tool I really like, for editing XML files, especially ones that have useful “human readable” representations, like XHTML:

XMLmind XML Editor

Features:

• There’s a “free” version (lacking some features). Professional version isn’t unreasonable for a single seat.
• Written in Java so it’s cross platform
• You can easily create new templates for new XML schemas (just create or point at a DTD and a CSS stylesheet from a valid, minimal, but otherwise empty XML file conforming to the DTD)
• Has a plug-in architecture, and there are a few plugins you can get right from their site, as well as write your own.

I find myself using it to edit XHTML, DocBook and other XML file types (e.g. DITA).

The advantage over something like JEdit is that rather than telling you when you create invalid markup, it won’t let you create invalid markup. And it certainly won’t let you create non-well-formed markup. (If the preceeding distinction isn’t clear then read the definitions of well-formed and valid.)

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