TotalEdit 4.1 code editor review

written by craig, 25 February 2008

I recently wrote an article with reviews of my top 10 editors that satisfied my requirements for web development coding.

Since then, I’ve discovered TotalEdit. It’s a great Windows general-purpose text and code editor developed by CoderTools in the UK. It’s been a commercial product for a while, but a free version is now available. There’s also a Pro version that provides an ODBC-compliant database explorer and SQL querying tools, but the free editor is reviewed below.

Attractive interface

The first thing that strikes you about TotalEdit is the interface: it’s gorgeous and looks more professional than most of the competition. The editor will feel familiar to anyone who’s used VisualStudio or other Microsoft coding tools. There are several themes to choose from and they all look great.

The menus and toolbars are very configurable. You can create your own toolbars and move icons around to suit your preferences. Sub-windows can be opened, closed, or collapsed and expanded on hover.

The editor itself appears to be based on Scintilla. Although it’s not quite as fast as some others, the interface is generally responsive and slick.

Features

Everything you need is supplied with the standard installation of TotalEdit. The highlights:

• support for multiple languages
• good colour-coding and font choices
• unobtrusive project management
• file explorer
• function list
• find, replace and find in files
• code compare
• spell checker
• macros
• Unix and Windows file encoding
• printing customisation and preview
• USB drive support

Although there’s no support for custom plug-ins, you’re unlikely to miss it given the level of functionality provided out of the box.

Does it beat Notepad++?

TotalEdit is one of the nicest Windows editors available, but it won’t replace Notepad++ on my PC just yet. The Notepad++ interface is functional rather than attractive and whilst TotalEdit is undoubtedly nicer, that alone wouldn’t persuade me to use it.

However, there are a few niggling points that stop me switching to TotalEdit:

• There is no tag auto-completion for XHTML and XML. I really don’t want to type closing p’s and div’s!
• You can change the colour coding, but only the foreground and background colours: bold and italic are not supported. That’s unfortunate since that can help you spot errors quickly.
• The spell checker checks everything and does not ignore code, tags, etc. That’s not a huge problem for program code, but it makes HTML pages very awkward.
• The function list is better than most, but seems a little flaky. It often fails to update, adds a strange entry at the end of the list, and crashed the application on several occasions.
• It’s not possible to assign macros to keystrokes. I often set up simple macros for empty functions or CSS declarations, but it’s quicker to type them than run them from the macro menu.

Overall, I like TotalEdit. It’s almost as fast and functional as Notepad++ and almost as pretty as Aptana. If you’re looking for an editor that’s halfway between those two, then TotalEdit could be for you.

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7 comments:

1. 29 February 2008 TheGodSplinter commented

   I really love Total Edit, but it frequently becomes a “sudden” and tremendous drain on resources and slows my machine so much that I am often forced to save my text files in Total Edit and then just shut it down. The writers need to knuckle down and get to work on that. I prefer to use Total Edit, now, to the use of every other textie on my computer and I’d love to see this get even better. Text editor writers tend to forget that looks are crucial to many users – T-E looks great!

2. 1 March 2008 Alek Davis commented

   TotalEdit seems to have a bug in RegEx search. I wanted to add a character to beginning of line (for every line) using the caret symbol (standard RegEx syntax), but it replaced the whole text. Both Notepad++ and PSPad had bugs when dealing with RegEx replacement for beginning and end of lines, but PSPad has recently fixed the problem and it now works as it is supposed to. I’m not sure if it workes in Notepad++ now.

3. 10 April 2008 Ch Norman commented

   No HTML-tag inserting, and no templates – do I something wrong or have I forgotten something at the install?

4. 27 April 2008 James commented

   Last week we released TotalEdit 4.2, which we believe to be our best release yet. The regular expression, function list and vista spell-check hanging issues are now fixed as is the list explorer used to insert synbols and HTML into a document. Improving performance seems to be a never ending quest but we’re getting there. Thanks to all that have given feedback, it continues to help us shape the product.

5. 28 April 2008 Craig commented

   Great news about v4.2. TotalEdit’s a fantastic editor and it’s great that you don’t charge for such a fine piece of software. I’ll be taking another look shortly.

6. 30 April 2008 Craig commented

   I’ve taken a quick look at TotalEdit v4.2.2…

   I’m pleased there’s a non-install USB version; it was the first I tried. Unfortunately, it didn’t work too well: the language parsers appeared to be missing (although the files were there) and it wouldn’t save configuration settings?

   The installable version fixed those problems. With reference to my issues above, the function list is more reliable, but double-clicking a function name is quirky and often jumps to the function above. Collapsing the function pane also prevents the list refreshing properly. None of the other issues I mentioned have been addressed.

   I noticed a few minor bugs too: e.g. clicking “Save all” throws a “Save? Yes/No/Cancel” box for every file that needs to be saved.

   If you’re using TotalEdit already, then it’s worth upgrading (watch out for the upgrade instructions on the CoderTools site). But for me, it’s still got a little way to go before it’ll sway me from Notepad++.

7. 21 October 2008 Craig commented

   It’s been a while since I tried TotalEdit, so I installed 5.0.8 today. The editor is still fabulous, and appears to be faster, more stable, and use less memory.

   The interface is just as easy to use and probably even more gorgeous. A lot of work has gone into the colour-coding; bold and italic can be used and the configuration is great. I’m not sure if I missed it last time, but you can also split a document and edit separate parts (like you can in MS Word).

   The downsides? There’s still no tag auto-completion or keyboard-assigned macros and the function list and spell-checker have not been improved. The USB version still does not work correctly, either. I’d also add another couple of requests:

   1. Enable middle-clicking on a tab to close it. I’m so used to doing that – blame Firefox!

   2. Once a document has been split, it would be great if you could edit different documents in the top or bottom pane.

   Overall, TotalEdit 5 is a great update and highly recommended. Perhaps by v6.0 it’ll overtake Notepad++ as my editor of choice!