I know Im a fool to myself but I never really liked Eclipse and prefer lighter apps.

I tend to use screem nice and simple, doesn’t slow you down.

I started my web design days using the undisputed king, Front Page Express, which I created my first site with. It gained 150,000 hits in 6 months on a free .com domain name that came bundeled with a big banner across the bottom. The site was in frames; I used Paint Shop Pro to do the graphics. It also had a lot a Java (not JavaScript) that was generated with a program called Anfry.

After that, I moved over to Dreamweaver, but never actually launched anymore sites.

When I started to get serious about making web sites I started using Abode GoLive, which has some excellent code editing features.

After a brief affair with Zend Studio, I returned to Adobe GoLive, which I was becoming increasingly frustrated with due to its lack of tabs.

I briefly used Eclipse, but like yourself discarded it because it is bulky and has horrible font rendering and UI.

Now I am using a lightweight editor called jEdit. It has a good UI with a lot of customisation options. You can easily download plugins direct from the app from sourceforge. Other than that its just like Notepad with syntax highlighting.

Dreamweaver’s synchronize feature is good, and I quite like the interface, but I always found FTP unreliable, also it costs too expensive for what it is…. I used it a lot for JSP… but the logic was in compiled classes (done in a different program), so there was little programming to be done in DW.

I still havent tried jEdit… will have to give it a go… I only really use php edit now… it has some really nice features, like being able to add watches and break points to your code… not many editors offer that for PHP.

When I am working with code I know well I don’t like to have it with comments, but when I am working on old code I like to have them to refresh the memory banks.

You would probably be able to write such a plugin for jEdit, as it is Java and seems to have a good plugin system.

I wouldnt have thought it would be that difficult… I imagine the comments are greyed out anyway, I would imagine you could add a switch to the code that does that formatting to hide it instead of turning it grey…. once you have trawled the source….

I’m still having fun with standard notepad and FF extension Firebug, it’s enough for most of my HTML/CSS writings…