Product Reviews
Small-Sized Editor with the Big Heart
The latest version of EmEditor adds cool new features, including support for Visual Basic .NET.
EmEditor has pushed out another minor release. I looked at 3.28 not long ago,
but 3.30 deserves a quick mention. EmEditor distinguishes itself by small size,
smart color-coding, and a good plug-in API, as well as the use of SDI rather
than MDI. There's also excellent Unicode support, easy customization, and good
customizability of the user interface.
The new version does add a few features. One is improvded integration with
external tools; it's very easy to add an icon to launch your favorite utilities
from within EmEditor. The syntax highlighting has been updated with increased
coverage of VB .NET and ASP.NET. Though you wouldn't want to replace the Visual
Studio .NET IDE with EmEditor on a regular basis, it's an excellent fits-on-a-floppy
editor that you can take to the deployment Web server when you need to do so.
They've also added bookmarks (though bookmarks don't persist between sessions)
and regular expressions in the keyword highlighting feature.
As I said in my first review, EmEditor doesn't try to out-feature the big and
expensive competition. But for a quick text editor, it's a nice piece of work.
EmEditor is shareware, so you can download and try it before deciding whether
it's worth the $30.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.