I am another one who ‘gets’ this article.
I am a big advocate of using the simplest software possible and sticking to one, monospaced font too.
It makes me wince a little when I look on the drives at work and see people have saved the simplest of notes in spreadsheets or .doc files.
It is even worse when they use tables in Word!
My site [shameless plug] is all about the beauty and simplicity of the plain text file.

You didn’t mention one of my big reasons for going with text files: proper version control.

If your document is in text form, version control systems will properly handle it. Sure, you can use binary files in version control, but the version control system won’t understand the structure of the information in the file. It will work especially poor for compressed formats like ODF and OOXML, because even a small change in the document can change the entire file, which is misleading to version control.

Without understanding the content of the file, the version control system can’t do many things, like merging and blame/praise. The repository will also tend to grow in size by O(n), since commits can’t delta-compressed well (due to the document format compression).

For example, I keep my resume in LaTeX and have it checked into a Git repository. If I need to spin off custom versions for some special use, I make a branch and commit the specific changes to it. If I later update my main generic resume I can trivially merge these updates into any custom version branches I have.

I love doing it this way.

A word processor may have some kind of change tracking, but compared to a real, powerful version control system like Git, it’s going to be a sucky half-assed implementation.

Another small Notepad like text editor is Metapad.

Or you could use Vim. :mrgreen: Or Emacs.

There is also a registry hack somewhere that will make Vim the default windows text editor (it will make it the editor that opens when you do View Source in IE and etc..)

Notepad replacements there are a ton of them, Notepad++ is the last one i played with. It is similar to Notepad2 but supports tabs and has a few more features. Naturally it probably doesn’t have as small a footprint, but I never checked just assuming.

Matt`, if you like Notepad, you should look into Notepad2. It is similar load times, similar look and feel, and similar memory footprint – but it does have syntax highlighting, and doesn’t mind opening really big text files.

You can actually swap notepad.exe with the it’s executable so that it acts like a seamless drop in replacement.

Nothing wrong with plain text – I have notepad pinned to my start menu for when I want to make a quick note of something. MS Word or OOo Writer take too long to load up when all I want to do is write 3 lines of stuff to remind myself of something later.

Although from the sound of it, if I ever want to use plain text for anything “serious” like coding or suchlike then I’d want to get a better text editor than notepad :wink:

I do use Firebug, and yes – it is pretty sweet. Then again, a lot of my work happens on the back end so I don’t use it all that much.

I agree vacri Firebug is a great FF extension, I’ve used it tho I’m not using it now. I’m not really a web developer tho I set up a web site for a local business and for a friend of mine selling organic cookies. That was for free and for fun tho :)

And ah yeah while we are on the topic of firefox add-ons, another cool one for web developers is the Web Developer toolbar. It’s very popular and i suppose needs no introduction.

And Luke I haven’t used Komodo Edit yet, I was planning on trying it out when ya first blogged about it but kinda spaced it out. Kinda too busy right now to play with it but it certainly looks cool.

For coding html – if you’re a web developer and you’re not using the Firefox extension Firebug, you should slap yourself.

Dynamically update any code and see immediately what it does, mousing over code highlights the parts of the page that code applies to, stuff and more stuff, and then a few more goodies. It does this dynamically for any page you visit, not just your own. Nice. I’m not a web developer myself, but friends of mine use it, and it’s a very sexy piece of software.