Forum:Which external editor do you use?

Although I primarily use the built in source markup editor here at Wikia, I find that Scintilla is useful when working on JavaScript. I find that CSS rarely becomes complex enough to warrant an external editor.

When browsing other wikis in search of inspiration I often come across promising templates that seem to be optimized for minimum byte count but sub-optimal for human parsing. (I suspect authors do this to avoid a newline creeping in where it is not wanted.) viz. In such cases I laboriously add newlines and indentation while being careful not to insert a newline or white space in between elements or in between parser functions. e.g. I wonder how many find the markup below easier to parse by eye than the markup above? (They are identical.) 
 * FYI: the syntax  is a semantic annotation markup, it is not a malformed intra-wiki link.

Maybe I am alone in thinking this way but, a complex template that is not easily interpreted by another contributor is not in the spirit of a collaborative wiki community.

So I am wondering:
 * What external editor are you using for wiki markup?
 * If you are a fan of Scintilla then can you point me to a lang.properties file for the MediaWiki markup language?
 * Are there any tips or tricks for "pretty" or "tidy" views of such ugly template/parser function/semantic annotations as you see above.

-najevi 04:13, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * FWIW: I currently use SciTE Version 1.77-wbd-1 (Dec 7 2008 15:34:00) by Neil Hodgson. It supports 32 "languages" via a lang.properties file for each language. However, I have not attempted to integrate SciTE with the "use external editor" user preference. In fact, now that I am looking for it, I find no help page on the subject of using an external editor!

I use: Firefox + Its all Text! + Notepad++ --Uberfuzzy 09:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)