You’re Programming in What?

Looking for a text editor that is powerful, customizable, but still simple to use? In an earlier post we mentioned EditPlus as a good choice for a text editing tool for developers. One of its advanced features is the ability to use a custom syntax file. These are basically configuration files designed to support your project, if it doesn’t fall into one of the standard languages it has by default.

EditPlus 3 includes HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript, CSS, Python, Ruby, Visual basic, XML, and VBScript syntax files. That’s pretty inclusive of the common development languages, but certainly doesn’t cover everything.

Adding a syntax file is easy as creating a text file in their standard .stx format. Their help files suggest using an existing stx file to create your custom version. Included are fields to specify delimiters, quotation marks, and comments. It also includes more advanced features of HTML embed and autocomplete.

But before you go and get started creating your own stx file for your project, take a look at EditPlus’ “User Files” page on their website. Their community of users has contributed many custom syntax files that may match, or closely match what you need for your project. Just some of the contributions are:

• GNU Octave
• Smali
• Progress 4GL
• Google’s Go
• Adobe Illustrator CS4 Javascript

Every submission has a date associated with it. You can easily tell which ones might work for you and those older ones that might not be valid.

There are some pretty niche languages on their user list. What is the most crazy thing you’ve ever coded in?