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technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 4 good HTML editors that are totally freeFeb. 21, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers You donít need expensive software to create good Web pages. As I discovered for myself a few weeks ago, you donít even need to pay anything for a good Web-page editor. Free ones are much better than you might think. Thatís what I found out after I started looking around for a replacement for my aging version of HomeSite, the HTML editor Iíd used under Windows for years. Iíd gotten away from HomeSite for a year or two while using Linux-based HTML editors, but when I installed Windows 2000 as my primary operating system I knew I needed a solid replacement for my old version of HomeSite. The current version of HomeSite is a fine Web-page editor, but somehow HomeSite must have caught the ìcreeping-feature fluî when I wasnít looking. I needed something simple yet powerful, just like HomeSite was in the old days. My happy experiences with Open Source (and therefore free) software under Linux prompted me to search for free HTML editors for Windows. I was delighted to find four very good HTML editors that donít cost anything. They were the top performers among two dozen free HTML editors I downloaded and tried out earlier this month. Most of them were too lame to be worth anyoneís time, but the three I am writing about this week were a match for most commercial HTML editors. They are: Expresso, by Finnish programmer Aapo Laitinen, which you can download directly here: http://www.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win95/html/exprb100.zip. HTML Beauty++ ME, by Marko Njezic. Get it from http://www.max.co.yu/htmlbeauty/. (The site might be hard to reach. Keep trying at various times of the day if you canít get through.) 1st Page 2000, by Evrsoft of Queensland, Australia, which you can get from http://www.evrsoft.com. HomeSite 1.2, by Nick Bradbury, available from this address: ftp://ftp.zdnet.com/fr/public/hs12set.exe. Both Expresso and HomeSite 1.2 have interesting stories. Expresso seems to be an abandoned orphan. Laitinen, the programmer, has stopped working on Expresso and recommends HTML Beauty instead. Theyíre similar, but HTML Beauty is clearly more advanced. HomeSite 1.2 is Nick Bradburyís first ìfinishedî version of HomeSite. He no longer owns the commercial version of HomeSite, but the agreement he made with Allaire, the current owner, allows him to give away the older version. I liked all four, although I was dismayed to see that HomeSite 1.2 still has the same bad bug that I and many others found (and complained to Bradbury about) years ago: Large files lock up the program. If you never work on large HTML files, youíll never have a problem. I found I had to customize the way 1st Page worked before I was comfortable with it. Ctrl-Home, for example, didnít bring my cursor to the top of the file until I changed the setup. But that was my only complaint about 1st Page. Itís fast and easy to use. So is Expresso. I liked it right away. Everything worked the way it should. But my choice among the four free editors is HTML Beauty++ ME, for two reasons: The layout and controls are better thought out than on any of the others and the programmer is still developing it, fixing problems and bugs and adding features. Among the features already included are multiple file editing, customizable syntax highlighting, unlimited undo and redo, drag-and-drop editing, right-click tag editing, template support, keyboard macros, auto updating code snippets, custom tag library, tag case changing capability, toolbars, built-in preview and much more. (Njezic, the programmer, wrote to me after I had mistakenly assumed that the author of Expresso, Aapo Laitinen, had also written HTML Beauty. I'm happy to correct my error.) |