SciTE vs Codelobster
When comparing SciTE vs Codelobster, the Slant community recommends SciTE for most people. In the question“What are the best simple text editors for Windows?” SciTE is ranked 9th while Codelobster is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose SciTE is:
It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Flexible
It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.
Pro Lightweight
With less than 2 MB of binary on Windows, SciTE starts instantly. Plus, if you don't need all the config, syntax files, blah, there's a 678k standalone .exe version. Nothing is going to beat that for lightweight and start-up times. Stick it in a folder that is already on your PATH.
Pro Powerful
Based on the Scintilla source code editor, SciTE has some advanced features like rectangular editing, simple regular expression search and replace, code folding, etc. It allows the user to launch a compiler or interpreter, and it can also interpret the error messages, jumping at the location they point to.
Lua scripting is key to SciTE's power and flexibility. The Lua scripting language can be used to perform complex text transformations. It's relatively simple syntax and its large user-base makes it a great choice for a scripting feature.
Pro Built-in shell
The console window can show the result of ran commands (like build current file, reporting warnings, and errors), but also accept interactive shell commands.
Pro Portable
SciTE works on Windows and Linux, and it also has a commercial port on MacOS.
Pro Powerful syntax highlighting for numerous languages
Lexers providing folding and syntax highlighting are based on code, not on regular expressions. They support context, nesting, special rules, etc.
Pro Free (except on Mac) and open source
SciTE is written in C++, with lot of contributors, both to the core and to the numerous lexers.
Pro GUI
Has a simple graphical user interface
Pro Advanced support for all popular frameworks
Including Laravel, Bootstrap. jQuery, WordPress, Drupal, Yii and so on.
Pro Special support for JQuery through the jQuery plugin
The jQuery support (when you install the jQuery plugin) is great. It adds function definitions so that autocomplete works as intended. Furthermore, the IDE knows about the logic of the different libraries and frameworks and can understand that $(this)
refers to a jQuery instance.
Pro Great HTML, CSS and JavaScript autocomplete
Codelobster has great HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP autocomplete
Pro Free version available
There is a free version available for download; it comes with a lot of features that you would find in an IDE.
Pro Portable option available
Codelobster IDE offers a lightweight, portable option.
Pro Hovering over a CSS property shows you which browsers are supported by that property
This is a really nice feature as it immediately shows you the browsers that support a certain CSS property. Of course, it does not beat actual testing, but it's still a nice feature that saves developers a lot of time.
Cons
Con Hard to config
The configuration is mainly a file-based config, which can be unintuitive and difficult to use for new users.
Con Missing file browser
SciTE's greatest weakness is perhaps the file browser. It does not really have one, just a poor substitute which works a little bit like a terminal window with ls
or dir
commands to show the files in a directory.
Con Customization
No extensions, Themes.
Con You need to sign up to get a free serial number for the free version
In order to use the free version of Codelobster, you have to sign up and get a free account. This is done to help stopping piracy, but it's still pretty jarring when all you want to do is install a program.
Con Expensive
For the Pro version (which includes all the available plug-ins), the cost is $99.95. The lite version (without plugins) is $39.95.
