Best Editor
 

I am thinking about doing some re-working of some mods to make them better and teach myself how to mod. I would like to know what in your opinion is a good editor to edit and compare different mod files. I was thinking that 'Notepad++' would be a great program. Has anyone got any suggests or comments on this?

Notepad++ Rocks! hands down. :D

Though it could be considered overkill, you could use a full IDE like Visual Studio Express or NetBeans to edit XML files. Aside from syntax highlighting, they also provide XML validation to make sure you're not creating a file that will crash EQ2 and things like tree views of the XML structure.

If I remember, all three mentioned can do syntax highlighting, on-demand formatting. I thought Visual Studio had a tree view of XML but I can't find it right now. I don't like Notepad++'s limited/altered regex support and Visual Studio also has an altered regex capture/replace syntax that I don't like.

I'm surprised that no one has made an XML schema file for EQ2. I know Visual Studio can use one as an auto-complete source for elements and attributes. But I'm a bit unexperienced with advanced XML file usage... .xsd/.dtd/XSL Transformations and such.

I also used Notepad ++ and it seems to be worthy of the recommendation by an experienced IT friend. No issues with it so far, although I must stress I've been "mucking around" with the UI for merely a few weeks now, only seriously editing things in the last couple :p:nana: