Neil Merton

Windows TextMate Port

I’ve never really used the TextMate editor, but have always heard good things about it from the Mac community. It’s an ingenious approach to code writing as it tried to aid writing code quickly by offering snippets in a variety of coding languages (including ColdFusion).

It was purely by chance that I happened to stumble upon a new text editor that has just become available for the PC called e-TextEditor and it seems to emulate TextMate very closely, which is nice.

So, naturally I was quick to download and install it. After applying the ColdFusion Bundle (which was a breeze thanks to cfTextMate) I tested out the editor’s nifty features. Very impressive, and I’m sure with regular use writing ColdFusion will be an even more pleasurable experience.

Here’s a few items I really like:

1. Indent guides - provides a visual guide to your code indents
2. Themes - loads of different colour themes to choose from (not essential, but a nice bonus!)
3. Bundles - these are code ‘packages’ that allows the magic to happen (e.g. simply type ‘cfif’, press tab and be amazed!)
4. TODO / FIXME / CHANGED - simply add these to comments and then view the list of things to do

The editor is still in beta stage, so it’s a little rough around the edges, but I know I’ll be keeping a very close eye on it’s progress.