If you’re battling with the text display in jEdit, like I did the first time around, and you’re not a big fan of the omnipresent Courier in the developers’ editors, I suggest you search for “Bitstream Vera Mono”, a nice monospaced TTF font.

After you install the font you should, in Windows at least, tweak the font smoothing to make it look good. See the screenshot below for my settings:

Keywords: cleartype, clear type, font smoothing, smooth fonts, font display, jedit options

Many people still ask me what I use for website design on the coding side with a thought that “Dreamweaver is better than Frontpage” on the tip of their tongue. Since they are usually quite new to the world of Web from the developers’ perspective they end up baffled, because I argue that they invested unwisely: into tools, rather than skills.

I’m not going to waste time laying down the pros and cons of using this or that. I will rather just put down my recommendation. First, use a simple text editor, rather than the all-knowing tools. It may appear slower and harder at the beginning, but will pay off in the end. Secondly, the best such editor is, in my opinion, Slava Pestov’s open source jEdit. You can download it on their page and once installed head on to selecting the plugins you’ll need. Here is a screenshot of the ones I recommend for PHP and HTML.

If you do give jEdit a try, then read the jEdit 4.3 User’s Guide first. It’s in PDF and can be printed out for handy reference.

You will need to change all of the following files in order for XAMPP to accept the Apache configuration setting for PHP.