Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Notepad++ and the Ruby Blue style…

I enjoy using Visual Studio as an all-in-one IDE for Windows programming, but when I’m writing code for the web, I prefer simpler text editors. I’ve tried many, and eventually settled on Notepad++ sometime last year.

What I really like about Notepad++ (besides the fact that it’s free) is how lightweight it is. It fires up instantly, just like classic Notepad does, and at the same time includes all the features that I want, including syntax highlighting, auto-completion, brace matching and auto-indentation, tabs, support for regular expressions, macros etc.

Notepad++ - Ruby Blue

As I was working on a project this morning, it occurred to me that I should mention a custom syntax highlighting style called Ruby Blue that I’ve been using (image above, courtesy of the author). It’s quite surprising how beneficial a good font and syntax highlighting scheme can be, and Ruby Blue, coupled with DejaVu Sans Mono or Consolas, works very well for me.

The Ruby Blue style is also available for Vim and TextMate.

Do you have a favorite text editor, monospace font, and syntax highlighting scheme?

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10 Responses to “Notepad++ and the Ruby Blue style…”  

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  1. Have you tried ‘e’ the Windows TextMate clone?

    Favourite editor is TextMate, with BitstreamVera (DejaVu basically) and the Vibrant Ink scheme. Used to be a big fan of ProFont but BitstreamVera is just nicer.

    e: http://www.e-texteditor.com/
    Vibrant Ink: http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2006/01/03/textmate-vibrant-ink-theme-and-prototype-bundle

    Geoff, Jul 11th, 2007 at 3:33 am

  2. Notepad++ is also my favorite choice when VS2005 is not really an option. I haven’t really looked into any plug-ins for it yet, but maybe I should…

    Nima Nikzad, Jul 11th, 2007 at 11:33 am

  3. @Geoff: I had stumbled upon the “e” site a while ago, but never got around to installing the trial. I’ll have to take a look. Support for TextMate bundles looks especially interesting. Do you use those often?

    And thanks for the link to the Vibrant Ink scheme. Since I couldn’t find a Ruby Blue port for VS2005, I’m using that for now. They’re quite similar, actually. =)

    Kunal, Jul 11th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

  4. I’ve been using Notepad 2.0 for a long time, although recently I came across Firebug, so I’m going to give that a try for my next project.

    If I don’t like it, I’ll give this a shot too.

    ofg, Jul 12th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

  5. I spend damn near every minute of everyday in TextMate staring at ruby code using Vibrant Ink

    Geoff, Jul 13th, 2007 at 4:53 pm

  6. @Geoff: I meant, do you use bundles in TextMate often? =)

    Kunal, Jul 13th, 2007 at 9:34 pm

  7. I’ve been using Notepad++ as a notepad replacement for quite some time now. It won’t replace an IDE, but I like it for quick edits. Then again, I haven’t found an IDE that I truely liked. I wish Eclipse would run natively on Windows without all that Java.

    vern, Aug 3rd, 2007 at 10:33 pm

  8. I really like Notepad++ but is there a way of wrapping a selection in a specific tag, eg bold text in the way that you can in Textmate?

    Jake, Sep 18th, 2007 at 8:52 am

  9. the highlight engine doesn’t work on Notepad++ 4.1.2

    nudel, Jan 24th, 2008 at 10:17 am

  10. Does anyone have the ruby blue color for ruby syntax. I noticed this was only for php, html, css, and javascript.

    Tony, Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:05 pm

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