Notepad++ the best lightweight CF editor

Posted on July 24, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion |

Every developer needs a trusty text editor that does more than just Notepad - something that’s lightweight, loads fast, has good searching features and some syntax highlighting. Eclipse is indispensible, but there are plenty of times I just can’t be bothered firing it up - or if it’s open, the file I want to edit isn’t in an Eclipse project. Eclipse is “heavy” and resource hungry. Sometimes you need something just the opposite.

Enter Notepad++. It has been my tool of choice for a while now - it has excellent multi-file searching, loads in a flash and supports a boat load of languages with syntax highlighting (js, xml, css, asp etc). What I’ve always missed is syntax highlighting and dictionary support for CF.

Well I cracked today, did a bit of googling and found a solution! Howard @ DelayedInstantiation has put together language support for Notepad++ so big kudos to him for developing the plugin!

I installed it today and works like a charm - the little catch though (if using Vista) is to install the plugin in the %AppData%/Notepad++/ directory, not in the %ProgramFiles%/Notepad++/ directory.

So if you’re on the lookout for a quality, lightweight editor for CF, take a squiz at Notepad++. It seems to be regularly maintained (up to v5!), and now it has CF language support, it’s an indispensible tool in my armoury.

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Comments

31 Responses to “Notepad++ the best lightweight CF editor”

  1. Jim Priest on July 25th, 2008 3:03 am

    Ah - great find. I’m usually in CFEclipse all day but I do use Notepad++ for the quick things.

  2. David Tucker on July 25th, 2008 12:56 pm

    In my previous life when I was a CF programmer - I used Notepad ++ almost exclusively for daily tasks. I would fire up CFEclipse for the serious work, but the easy things all were done in Notepad ++. For a simple fix, I could open up Notepad ++ - make the fix and save it before Eclipse finished loading.

  3. Perdy on October 28th, 2008 7:50 pm

    Great work.

  4. Briefe Schreiben on November 23rd, 2008 1:41 am

    Hi there! Your Post “ad++ the best lightweight CF editor : On the Bubble” is very interesting for me. Unfortunately my written English is not so good so I write in German: Dir, meinem liebsten, geh

  5. Brendon on May 6th, 2009 7:13 am

    You might also try UltraEdit - It’s a great editor too!

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