Cooledit 3.5.3

Introduction

Text editors are very personal things. I found this out when I wrote a very positive review of NEdit. I received a number of comments, nearly all by email. No-one agreed with me, which doesn’t by itself bother me. But no-one disagreed with me as such either. All the messages were from Emacs users who thought that it was the only real editor and that I was misguided thinking otherwise.

This time I think I’m unlikely to incur the wrath of Emacs users. Cooledit is just not going to appeal to the same people. If Emacs is equivalent to O’Reilly books, Cooledit is a Dummies Guide.

Look and feel

This is going to become the theme of the review: text editors are very personal things. When I say that I’m not keen on either the look or feel of Cooledit, I must also point out that there is nothing wrong with it either.

There are good bits. I like the default colour scheme. White on blue is very easy on the eyes. And the default, fixed-space typeface is very readable, too — I’m not sure what it is, though. The tool-bar down the left-hand side of the text window is useful and it would be immediately obvious what the buttons did even if it didn’t have text on the icons and ‘tool-tips.’

For a text editor with an emphasis on ease-of-use, Cooledit is actually quite powerful. In addition to the normal cut and paste, search and replace and file management facilities, Cooledit also has built in scripting and dialog-based configuration of keyboard shortcuts and the environment.

It does, however, look a little amateurish. While the menus do have Office 97-style highlighting when the mouse point moves over them, it’s difficult to take them seriously when they drop down. They look so big and clunky that you can immediately tell that they’ve been designed by a programmer. They’re not easy to get rid of if you pull down a menu by mistake, either.

And let’s not forget Cooledit’s most unique feature: it’s multiple document interface. Inside the main Cooledit window, you can have as many documents as you like. Behind all the windows is a picture of an igloo; it’s not entirely clear why it’s there. Documents can be moved around by dragging their border, and can be resized by dragging the bottom-right corner. These inner-windows don’t have title bars, which after years of finding a documents name by looking in the title-bar is a little confusing.

The interface does not take full advantage of its multiple windows, either. The load button and the open menu item actually operate on the currently open window rather than for Cooledit as a whole. This means that to open another file you need to open a new window (from the Window menu) and then load a file into it. This kind of operation would be acceptable for a program with only a single buffer — such as vi — but for a modern, GUI editor it’s just odd.

Conclusion

This has been a rather short and very negative review. As I have said, there is nothing strictly speaking wrong with Cooledit, it just feels wrong. It has all the right things in the right place; functionally it’s at least as good as NEdit. But it’s idiosyncratic user interface and ‘jokey’ appearance have a tendency to distract you from your work!

If you like to be different and you liked Borland’s cartoon ticks and crosses in its Windows applications, then you might go for Cooledit. If not stay well clear.