Notepad is not hard to beat; it's hard to find an editor that doesn't beat it. Notepad is a toy editor, lacking any semblance of productive efficiency. Now, can we close this silly thread and just read any of the hundred or so existing threads on this same topic? gary
I know that there are many so called "web designers" who use tools such as dreamweaver, but fact is that dreamweaver is totally obsolete, and dosn't really do much to increase productivity. Not to mention that most WYSIWYG tools creates a mess of your code. Normal text-editors like notepad, actually provide the best functionality you can ask for. The only useful function which is missing in notepad, is autocompletion. But its certainly not something i would rate as essential, since most just copy and paste code from old projects anyway. The actual hand-coding i do these days, is very limited. I however tend to use either Eclipse or notepad++, usually the latter. I don't really use features such as code collapsing, but i do enjoy syntax highlighting. Another editor i would recommend is Eclipse, but i rarely use it, because it takes aroung 5-10 seconds to open. Thats where light-weight editors like notepad also start to shine, since they open so fast.
I used plain old Notepad for years until I started doing more work with php files. I switched to Crimson Editor, it is free and has syntax highlighting and line numbers. Line numbers are really handy when you mess up and get those dreaded error on line 498 warnings.