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20 Excellent Free (Web) Rich-Text Editors (webdesignerdepot.com)
20 points by chaostheory on Dec 3, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



I think '20 Excellent' is a stretch. Even the best Web-Based editors are bad. This is why there are so many of them. Nobody has solved this problem well.

From experience, here is what I can recommend and why:

  * TinyMCE - If you need an editor that has many features, go with this. The latest version have improved code output, but it is still questionable.  Of the feature-packed editors it is the most lightweight and produces the best code.

  * WidgEditor - It is ugly by default and has very few features.  It is probably also hard to extend.  That said it produces very clean code.

  * YUI Rich Text Editor - It is comparatively young and still pretty good.  If you use YUI it is probably good enough.


I'm still looking for a simple editor that can auto-indent code/text. (Not even context sensitive, but at least keep the indent of the previous line). I've only found buggy or overkill implementations.


I've been using UltraEdit for a long time. It's feature rich and easily configurable to your editing style. Windows only and costs $50. It has auto-indent, syntax highlighting, FTP editing, and all that good stuff.

For Java I also use eclipse. Free, has everything, including the kitchen sink, aint simple, significant learning curve. It's slow and a real memory hog, but it is really integrated into the java world.


Thanks for the recommendations, but I'm actually looking for an editor written in javascript to embed in a web site that allows some nice code editing (chiefly auto-indent).

Offline, I use textmate, smultron (both os x), vim.


AFAIK the only editor that can strip nasty paste-from-word HTML into nice pure XHTML, and that actually enforces XHTML is XStandard. Does anyone know if any of the other editors can do this?




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