First there was notepad… then there was wordpad, and then there was dreamweaver (huge resource sucking application that is very powerful) and then came ConText – and so far I haven’t switched. I use ConText for PHP and MySQL, but it also comes with highlighters for HTML and many others (190 others you can download from the site). This application is so powerful that I don’t use anything else at all, I have even replaced notepad with it. It is sleek, it is light, it hardly uses any resources, and I have loaded files bigger than 500 megabytes in it, big SQL files, without it crashing. It will take a while to load, but it will not crash if your system can handle it. This comes in extremely useful for me when I have to move a site. The program is a free open source project which has reached version 0.98.5, by version 1.0 there is a hex editor planned along with code browsers for C/C++ , Delphi and Visual Basic projects.
On the site it says it has an unlimited editing file size, so in theory if I have a 30 gigabyte SQL database I should be able to open it – but I don’t have anything nearly that big to test it out on. When it comes to being able to edit almost anything this program is pretty much the only one I know that can go from HTML to FORTRAN to assembly language. You can also open multiple files in the same window using tabs, or customize the settings to open a new window each time, and I haven’t yet reached a limit with how many I have been able to open.
This program is under 2 megs in size at download and installs without problems – it is extremely robust and I haven’t broken it and crashed a computer with it yet.
