Directly Edit HTML Source Files with This Text Editor for Total Control of Your Web Site

Web sites consist of web pages. Web pages are written in a simple file format called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML Files are really plain text files that you can perfectly edit with plain text editor like EditPad Pro. Even though today there are many decent visual HTML editors available that allow you to directly edit the web page as it would appear in the visitor’s web browser, many professional web designers still prefer to use a text editor to directly edit HTML files. Typing in the HTML tags yourself provides you with total control over your website. You are not limited by what the visual web editor can do. You do need to learn HTML. But HTML is a quite simple format that you can easily learn step by step. There are many good books available on the subject.

EditPad Pro is not just an excellent text editor for HTML files. You can maintain your entire web site with EditPad Pro. Edit cascading style sheets (CSS files), ASP.NET pages and PHP pages, server side scripts in Perl or Ruby, client side scripts in JavaScript or VBScript, RSS news feeds, etc.

EditPad Pro’s syntax coloring automatically highlights tags, attributes, comments and links in your HTML files. This makes HTML files much easier to navigate for your eyes. There’s a plain HTML syntax coloring scheme, and an “HTML scripting” scheme that highlights HTML with embedded JavaScript and VBScript. You can edit these syntax coloring schemes without any restrictions, e.g. to add support or other embedded scripting languages or mixed content HTML.

EditPad Pro also ships with several file navigation schemes for HTML files. One scheme gives you a list of HTML headings, making it easy to jump between sections of long web pages. Another builds a complete tree of all HTML tags, giving you a detailed view of complex HTML code. You can edit file navigation schemes without any restrictions to make them suit your own HTML design and editing style. The provided schemes also create foldable ranges, allowing you to hide sections of your HTML file with a single click or key press, to get a better overview.

Use EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP and SFTP client to upload your HTML files to your web server right within EditPad Pro. You can even edit web pages directly on the server via FTP, without having to download the HTML files to your computer’s hard disk first. EditPad Pro transfers files in the background, so you’ll never have to wait for all files to download, or for a file you’ve saved to finish uploading. You can go on editing right away. If you maintain multiple web sites, EditPad Pro can stay connected to multiple servers.

With the View|Browser command you can instantly preview the web page you’re editing in your default web browser. Add as many alternative browsers to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu as you want. Instantly check and clean up HTML files with HTML Tidy.

With EditPad Pro you can easily maintain very large web sites. There’s no limit to the number of files you can open simultaneously. Arrange HTML files of different web sites into separate projects to open a site’s files at once and edit them together. Open all files in a folder (and its subfolders) into a project. Many of EditPad Pro’s editing commands can work on all files in a given project at once. Quickly switch between files and projects by clicking on their tabs. Move back and forth with the handy “previous editing position” and “previously edited file” commands. Manage long lists of HTML files and large web sites with the handy file manager sidebar which can rename, move, copy and delete files.

EditPad Pro’s Clip Collection makes it easy to keep a list of HTML snippets at your fingertips, ready to be inserted into any HTML files. A sample collection is provided. Such a snippet can be a single HTML tag, half a web page, or anything you want. Clips can consist of “before” and “after” parts to be inserted around a selection, which is very convenient for inserting an opening and closing HTML tag pair.

You can make sure you’re writing with proper spelling by using EditPad Pro’s spell checker. Word lists are available in many languages. You can tell EditPad Pro to point out misspelled words in the current file, current project, all open files, or just the selected text. Turn on Live Spelling to make EditPad Pro highlight misspelled words as you type. The spell checker works together with the syntax coloring to automatically skip HTML tags and other text that’s not written in a human language (i.e. HTML vs. English).

EditPad Pro sports one of the most extensive search-and-replace features of any text editor. Quickly find the part of the file you want to edit. Highlight matches, fold lines, and skip over matches and files. Instantly make many replacements throughout a (rectangular) selection, file, project, or all files in all projects. Use regular expressions and adaptive case options for powerful and dynamic search terms and replacements. Clever use of EditPad Pro’s search-and-replace can automate much tedious editing.

A key advantage of using a text editor to edit HTML files is that the HTML tags are just text. You can easily search-and-replace HTML tags, HTML attributes, or even complete blocks of HTML code. Want to replace obsolete font tags with span tags using CSS? That’s a trivial search-and-replace in EditPad Pro, but an impossibility in most WYSIWYG HTML editors.

Record and play back keystroke macros to reduce repetitive tasks to a single key combination. Record a search as part of a macro to instantly edit all search matches in any particular way. Save any number of macros to build your own library of high-octane text editing wizards. Any menu item or keystroke can be recorded. You could record a macro that runs all browsers you’ve added to the Tools menu to create a super-preview macro.

HTML and Web Site Tools

You can add various tools and utilities to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu through Options|Preferences|Tools. You could add various browsers for testing your web site’s compatibility. You can even add web site URLs which will then be displayed in the default web browser.

This web site was created entirely with EditPad Pro. I store the source files as index.page.txt in a folder c:\web\source\editpad. I use a Perl script (created with EditPad Pro and added to the Tools menu) to produce the final file c:\web\pub\editpad\index.html.

In the Tools configuration, I created a tool with the command line file:///c:\web\pub\%FOLDER<1%\%FILENAMENODOT%.html. If I select this tool when editing c:\web\source\editpad\index.page.txt, EditPad Pro will open c:\web\pub\editpad\index.html in my web browser. %FOLDER<1% is a placeholder for the rightmost folder in the path (“editpad”), and %FILENAMENODOT% is a placeholder for the file name truncated before the first dot (“index”).

Similarly, I could add a tool with a command line of //www.editpadpro.com/%FILENAMENODOT%.html to open the page on the web server. All these versatile options in configuring tools are clearly explained in EditPad Pro’s help file and manual.