9.13 Finding a Better Editor

Notepad is a very rudimentary text editor. Although it serves our purpose, allowing us to write and save VBScript files, it doesn't go any further than it absolutely needs to. It has no toolbar, no syntax highlighting, no visible line numbers, and no macro feature. If you find yourself writing VBScript files often, you'll want to use a better editor. Now, Windows also comes with WordPad, although it doesn't do much more than Notepad in helping to write scripts, and it has that creepy Microsoft Word-like interface.

One direction to go is simply to use a better plain-text editor, such as UltraEdit-32 (http://www.ultraedit.com). It has many features prized by programmers, such as column selections, visible line numbers, a terrific multi-file search-and-replace, and many other goodies. However, it's still just a text editor and therefore doesn't provide any VBScript-specific assistance.

Most full-featured programming languages come with a rich programming environment that provides real-time syntax checking (similar to a spellchecker in your word processor; some even tell you right away if you missed a parenthesis), as well as context-sensitive help (you can get technical assistance as you're typing code). The problem is that Windows doesn't come with such an editor, nor am I aware of any decent VBScript editor at the time of this writing.

Some may suggest that you can use either the Visual Basic editor or the VBA editor that comes with Microsoft Office 97 or Office 2000 to write your scripts, but this should be taken with a grain of salt. Although VB and VBA do have a similar syntax to VBScript and even share many commands, the environments are different enough that it's more trouble than it's worth.