The more I try other “editors”, the more I appreciated Textpad. I was always in love with the fact that I could pick my line endings and encodings and it would Do The Right Thing. Even better, I loved that I could save Unicode/UTF-16/UTF-8 files and choose whether or not to write the BOM. Writing the BOM usually plays hell with things like ASP/.NET, so any program that always writes the BOM causes problems.
Yet another case in point. I tried a full copy of HomeSite 5.5 at work today. “Great!” I thought. It has PC/Mac/Unix line ending support and I could choose UTF-8 as my file encoding.
Sure enough, it always writes the BOM without any option to turn it off. At least Macromedia is aware of the issue. Back to Textpad I go.
And yes, I know about UltraEdit and Notepad2. I never liked UltraEdit because the interface was too busy and strayed from the standard windows toolbar icons. As for Notepad2, time to try it again.