I'm Using Notepad++

2015-10-27

Again

UPDATE! I've started using Atom (thanks to Oliver Dunk for reminding me about it), enjoy it a ton with the remote-edit package. I'll have a follow-up post with more thoughts :P

Maybe I'm just crazy. Or maybe there are some things I just really need my development area to do. Because of my job as CTO of a YouTube Network, I need to do a lot of work on the website, which means I need real-time access to it. I have a locally hosted server using XAMPP, but it's not enough -- for example, when I have subdirectories, or a .htaccess rule, I have to do this

<link href="/projectname/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet">

which is obviously incorrect when deploying it to a real server.

Maybe I should explain a bit more -- for the past few months, I've been sticking with Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's entry into the text-editor-that-also-has-syntax-highlighting-and-other-IDE-stuff area (or as I sometimes call it, simple IDEs). It's not bad, but for things like plugin support, it simply isn't there.

So why Notepad++? A piece of software that looks like it's from the 80s?

Well, for one, NppFTP. A small plugin that allows me to edit and upload file in basically real-time on a server. I've been using it for about 20 minutes and it's already super useful. Second, oodles of customization. I'm just getting back into it, but I already like it (the top bar is still ugly though).

As soon as vsCode adds FTP support, I'll probably immediately switch back to it. I love the aesthetic, and the autocomplete is decent. But for the time being, I'm sticking with Notepad++.