The Nerd Show Reviews SciTE: Linux Confi

A Review of SciTE by Henry Kroll 3rd 10-26-2009

The SciTE editor makes a surprisingly good IDE, not just because of all the features but also because of its speed and small size. At only 1.8 MB, SciTE loads extremely fast. If you're somebody who does as much work in a short amount of time as we do, those few extra seconds count! Being able to jot things down quickly can mean the difference between submitting a project on time and missing a crucial deadline. SciTE uses many standard libraries which on most systems are already loaded in memory.

There are many user-configured extensions and add-ons for SciTE. Everything about the interface is customizable with Lua scripting and there is plenty of API documentation available on the SciTE website. There are several utilities, games and even a hex editor written entirely in SciTE using the Lua extensions. Read more about extending SciTE here and here.

To be fair, there are some things that SciTE lacks compared with it's larger cousins, such as Eclipse or the NetBeans IDE. One of the most requested items is a file browser. If this bothers you just press F8 and type 'dir' in the output pane. (ls Linux) Now you may highlight any file and press CTRL-SHIFT-O to open it. It's just about as good and more versatile, since you can also type commands and see program output and man pages in that panel. See? Press F8 to close it again.

The calltips, keyword highlighting and auto-completion are very handy. What we think makes SciTE really great, however, are the column selection and editing. This is invaluable for programmers. (We work with a lot of data!) With column selection you can edit multiple lines and even type many commands at the same time! Take a look at the video for a demonstration SciTE's column editing features. Best of all, SciTE is free and open source. You can get it here. (External link. We are not affiliated with SciTE and derive no benefit for recommending this program one way or the other. We just think that you might find it useful.