14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that softwares like MS Word and OpenOffice are labeled as text editors by many users, there is a confusion in the terminology. A text editor and a text processor are two different things. While the latter deals with simply creating office documents, presentations generally intended for printing, the former refers to writing code lines that end up to be softwares like text processors.
Of course, the two categories have different targets and a text editor is mainly aimed at programmers. They have been longing for a long time for a powerful text editor able to support as many syntax schemes as possible and making the coding more accurate. I am not a big fan of coding and analyzing the code lines that compose a software, as the end product itself is of more interest for me. I have all the respect for programmers as they are doing all the work behind beautiful interfaces and accurate functioning of the applications.
EditEx Premium reached its 4th version and comes to the rescue for a price of $29.00. EditEx is a mature application capable of highlighting more then 50 syntax schemes including the most popular of them, C++, HTML, PHP, C#, INI, Java, Assembler or XML. Besides the head-start given by this feature the program can be continuously improved and customized by the user by means of the extensions support. To make your work more comfortable you can play with plugins, scripts and the different tools provided by the developer as well as add your own.
One cannot argue about the looks of such an application as functionality and clarity of options is what a programmer is looking for. So the looks are plain and simple and abundant in features and options. Working different jobs or a big one split into two or more parts is easy due to its tabbed document support. A minor mischief here is that you cannot move the tabs in a certain order so you will have to program them from the beginning.
For fast resuming your work you get to use the Side Panel where you can browse to the needed file, or you can simply drag and drop the file in the editor.
For a beginner programmer the lack of tooltips on the toolbar is going to be a minor issue until s/he gets the hang of it. The toolbar is intuitive enough, but having tooltips will only make the user more confident when using a certain tool.
Upon opening or starting a new job things can get simple by using one of the templates available for JavaScript.js, PHP Document.php or VBScript.vbs. Getting one of your own templates in that list or renaming one is impossible however. The various bugs in the application will also prevent you from running one of the plugins, scripts or tools available. Additionally, the software gives you no possibility to edit one of the newly introduced scripts.
The basic functions needed by a programmer are available in EditEx and the spell check is done automatically. Additional automated functions like enabling/disabling the number of lines or using the special characters, changing the case, etc., they are all available in EditEx.
The search capabilities are pretty advanced as they offer you the possibility of searching inside the files for certain text. The search criteria is abundant, allowing checking the files created on a certain date and after a user defined time as well as of certain attributes and sizes.
For a better view of the text EditEx sports the fullscreen feature that will hide everything but the line codes.
The dockable toolbars will definitely prove to be an asset when you need them closer to your mouse pointer. You can move them around and even make them desktop resident. My only problem was with the Side Panel which refused to embed in the interface after rooting it out. I think I wasted every possibility and even reinstalled the software but did not succeed in my endeavor.
Automatic HTML tags come to your help in doing a better job faster. These include adding link tags, images, table, choosing a color, adding a comment, breaking, centering, or font related tags.
After all the work is done, there are several ways to save your document. The most interesting of them is saving to a FTP location. All you need to do is provide the proper settings, linebreak and the name of the file and that is it. Files can be opened from a FTP location as well.
If you have a bunch of tabs opened in EditEx and they are all related to the same project you can easily save them all to a single group. Opening a group is also possible so time wasting is not one of EditEx's attributes.
Moving to the application's Options section you will be able to customize EditEx's display of the date/time format, highlighting colors, define the number of ?undos?, the tabwidth, the highlight color of the current line, file associations, assign shortcuts for different actions (File, Edit, Search, View, Format, HTML, etc.), auto correct configuration and spell check.
The Good
The software is packed with extremely useful features and options for a programmer. The icons in the toolbar are intuitive enough.
The HTML preview will give you a hint on how good your coding is and you can check if the links appended are performing according to your wish or not.
The Bad
Upon opening the application, I had to click OK for two errors (the first of them saying ?Invalid Number? and the second ?Cannot focus a disabled or invisible window?). After that, the interface loads with no problems whatsoever.
The bugs in the application prevented running a script, plugin or tool and the checking of the different elements in Plugins, Scripts and Tools menus was not done smoothly.
There was no way for me to edit a script and all I could do was name it and see it added in the list.
The Truth
The ?Known bugs? section in the help menu said nothing about the baddies presented in the lines above. The only discomfort the user would get when using EditEx would be some memory errors in Windows 95/98/ME and some small bugs with FTP.
Considering the ?defections? detected I would say that a $29.00 price tag is too much. But the 30-day trial period will give you enough time to properly put the application to your own test.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
