Text Editors with FTP Integration

Even though it may be hard to believe in this world of blogs and wikis, sometimes one wants to create one's own web site from *gasp*....hand-written HTML! Yes, it still happens - and for the nerdiest among us, it provides a sense of great joy to be able to forge a web page using nothing but the simplest of tools, a text editor and an FTP client. But, I've discovered a new luxury that I believe provides simplicity, yet retains the coveted nerd cachet, the text editor with built-in FTP capabilities!

So, I remember in the old days (like 4 months ago) when I used to have to open my FTP client, download an HTML page from the server, edit it on my computer, and the re-FTP it back up to the server. In fact, I would usually edit my pages right on the server using "pico" so as to avoid this whole process. That us until, I discovered TextWrangler. TextWrangler is just for Mac, but in the process of helping my wife create the web site for her new dance studio, I came across PSPad for Windows.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that PSPad does not support SFTP - TextWrangler does. Another text editor for Windows, JEdit, does provide SFTP. Thanks to Warren for bringing this up.

Both applications FTP clients built-in so that you can open files stored on a server (running FTP) just as easily as you would a file that resides on your local machine. For example, you could browse to the server, open an HTML file, edit it, and just click save. It will save back up to the server and you are done!

This technology has not only saved me a bunch of time, but has made working on web pages easier by providing a nice, syntax-colored environment within which to work. So, I would highly recommend installing one of these on your computer if you do any web work (or even write server scripts).

--Chris