I’ve always had creative instincts. But god forgot to bless me with any sort of traditional creative talent. I am a poor writer, my stick figures lack punch and sheet music scares me.
What I do know how to do though, is write code. And to me elegant, functional code is an art. I don’t mean to elude that I am some sort of code writing god. Often my code is far from elegant and sometimes even non-functional. But when things come together I still get a warm satisfaction after successfully developing an application.
That said, the tools of this trade are usually pretty simple. Painters have their bruses, musicians have their instruments and photographers their camera. Developers have their editor and until recently my editor of choice was either Macromedia Dreamweaver, or VIM (depending on where I was).
Dreamweaver is great for editing code, particularly the PHP code that I’m very fond of, since it provided syntax highlighting and a few other basic features to help me keep my code elegant. The downside is that Dreamweaver doesn’t come cheap and although its well worth the price, I have no use for a vast majority of the features Dreamweaver provides.
VIM on the other hand is a de-facto standard in linux text editing. VIM provides some of the basic features that I consider key to any editor like syntax highlighting. But it lacks in the ability to quickly move between files for edits.
Enter, Notepad++, combining the simplicity of VIM with the file management of Dreamweaver and the price of air (free) its been a dream come true for my development endevors. Whats the number one feature that makes Notepad++ my editor of choice? The ability to edit files from an FTP server like they were local files. Meaning I can edit the files at the server, from any computer without having to maintain local copies and try to keep them synced.
An just like a new brush, instrument or camera inspires the artist to try new things, look for some fresh code spilling onto the site in the future.