I bought a new Dell computer this fall, primarily to get a larger monitor (15" to 19") with a higher resolution (1024×768 to 1280×1024) and more memory (512MB to 1GB). I stayed with Windows XP and have seen a good increase in performance. It’s always a lot of work configuring a new computer — installing software and customizing settings — but it can be therapeutic to go through the process at least every few years.

As I was installing software on this new computer, I decided to research text-editing software again. (Back in 2004, I searched extensively and settled on Crimson Editor for local text documents and Dreamweaver’s code view for remote web documents.) After three years, the Unicode version of Crimson Editor has still not been released and the performance of Dreamweaver’s integrated FTP has proved too frustrating. I have found two new replacement programs that I have really enjoyed for the last month or so:

• EmEditor has a clean interface, launches quickly, and supports Unicode. It has some powerful features like macros that I have not yet fully explored. I am using an older free version (EmEditor Free 6), but it works great for editing text files locally. (The free version appears to be available only at download.com.)
• Aptana Studio provides a full development environment for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and (through a plugin) PHP. The integrated FTP client is so much better than Dreamweaver. The free community edition perfectly matches my needs for the web sites I manage.