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.
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