My search for a great text editor is somewhat of a long saga. I started out learning and writing the web languages such as HTML and Perl over 11 years ago. I used NOTEPAD! Can you believe it? Well that got pretty tedious in a hurry. I almost immediately switched to EditPad Classic.

This is a great editor and it lasted me many years. Some things that it lacked was syntax highlighting (in the free version, anyway). I wasn’t about to shell out the forty bucks right away, so I went on the search again, and found SciTE (Scintilla Text Editor). This is a very nice program and I continue to use it to this day because it has a very, very small footprint in memory and loads in the blink of an eye. It is very full featured, with a tabbed buffer switcher, syntax highlighting, and node folding.

Then a friend of mine that was getting interested in programming, but preferred to use a mac, got me back on the search for a text editor that would do everything SciTE does, but run on a mac. That’s when I found jEdit – Programmer’s Text Editor. jEdit will also run on pretty much any flavor of linux.

Along the way I also tried other text editors such as Eclipse. Well, you Eclipse folks are going to argue that it’s an entire IDE, and that’s fine–but I don’t yet have the need or want for an IDE at this point, I’m still somewhat a “text editing purist.” And I didn’t like Eclipse’s slow loading and bloated interface. jEdit has a satisfying selection of plugins, of which I only use a few, but I’ll highlight the ones that I use and why.

Also, jEdit’s syntax highlighter supports a huge variety of languages and standards. The first screenshot, above, shows a css file open, with syntax highlighting and folding demonstrated.

To the right is a screenshot of jEdit’s plugin manager, listing the plugins that I use. Click it to enlarge. Some of them are only on the list because they are dependent on others, (and some I don’t use anymore) so I won’t comment on quite all of them.

• BufferTabs, the buffer switcher. You can position it at the top or bottom.
• ConfigurableFoldHandler This is where we get the collapsing of sections, such as blocks of perl or php code between curly braces.
• JDiffPlugin Does very nice dual diff screen for finding differences between files. It adds highlighting in different colors to added, removed. and changed lines.
• XML This plugin enables tree-style browsing of XML and HTML document node structure. It also works with the folding plugins to allow collapsing nodes.

Time Clock

Here is a screenshot of a very simple, easy to use time clock program that I developed for a company that I work for. Here are its features:

1. QuickBooks integration
2. Client/Server architecture
3. MySQL database
4. Automatic lunch break and overtime
5. Unlimited users
6. PDF timesheet output
7. Written in Perl

PLEASE NOTE: This program is not available! It is property of the firm that I developed it for. I simply describe it here for bragging purposes.

Project, Process, and Detail Tasklist

I developed this program for organizing projects. After completing many complicated projects over the years, I observed that there are 3 elements to our daily lives: projects, processes, and details. Too often, we tend to heap all the details up on one big pile, and stand there scratching our heads.

This program was designed to organize a list of projects and their processes and details. The interface is very clean and simple, but the underlying data structure is quite sophisticated to allow detailed reporting. Some features include:

1. Client/Server architecture
2. MySQL database
3. Written in Perl

This program is currently in alpha. I use it at several installations to organize and track the many projects I have going at once, but it is not completed yet for general use.

Christian Light Publications

This is a publishing company in Virginia that sells a variety of Christian books and homeschool curriculum. I worked closely with their art department to create their page layout. They did a large image of how they wanted their homepage to look, and I converted it to HTML. I also developed their shopping cart and product search engine.  This screenshot is old, however, and their site has been redone recently.  (gotta love that classic mozilla chrome eh?)

Fudge by Design

On this web site you can upload your company’s logo, and Don will make you an edible business card. Sweet! This site will eventually have a design-it-yourself fudge feature that will allow users to create their own designs right online.  I recently re-did this one in Joomla, with many enhancements to the core Joomla and also extended the Virtuemart shopping cart component to add a clipart picker.  Check it out.

Late Patents

A fun and educational resource, this site contains a database of over a hundred thousand expired patents due to failure to pay maintenance fees. A refreshing break from the generic list-all patent sites, this is the first web site online to my knowlege that lists only expired patents. More…

Dan’s Workshop

This is what started out as my personal home page on my ISP’s bundled hosting space. Over the years, I have developed it into a highly successful ecommerce site with pay-to-download products.  I recently remodeled this site in Joomla also.