I recently found a tool called SciTE that can interpret Lua into that classic organized format that comes with most professional coding platforms. Here's the link: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html

It mostly helps with organization of structure, because it lets you see where all your statements end, puts your comments in green, emboldens variables, etc. Very useful indeed. It also has line numbers on the screen, so you no longer need to use the "Go to line" bit in Notepad.

Hope this helps the community!

Geany and Notepad++ are also damn good, offering just about everything you've just discussed.

A real programmer uses plain old Notepad!
...
Not really. The features of Notepad ++ and SciTE sound kinda useful and I've been planning to download something like them, but I'm too lazy to and I don't actually need any of the features.

++ is great even for good ol simple .ini editing. Get it.

CaveCricket, I really suggest you give one of them a try. I can guarantee you that it will make your scripts much more readable and organized, because tabbing becomes way less of a pain and everything is nice and highlighted for you. Even if it doesn't help you, when you post code, it will be much more readable.

Notepad++ is the greatest thing ever, seriously.

Find and replace in all opened documents is ridiculously useful.
I'd have downloaded it just for that.

Notepad++ is super great.
I haven't tried any of the alternatives, but I haven't needed to.

I just took a look at Notepad++, and I saw that it only comes in binaries.

I absolutely will not download any program that doesn't come in an .exe.

Um. If you'd actually, y'know, looked at it, instead of stopping at one link, you might have seen this page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/files/

Which, if you'll notice, contains a great big green executable file download.

Ah. I knew that...

Thanks

EDIT: Oh . My . GAWD !
Notepad++ is beautiful! AND it can be used as a default text editor?!?

I R N HVN !!!!

Thank you all so very much! NOTEPAD++ IS BEEZT!!!

3 smilies per post please, preferably less.

honestly..how do you find scintilla without already knowing about notepad++


btw real programmers use an actual IDE.

owned.

Real programmers use emacs

Real programmers play tetris in emacs.

Then they switch to Vim for real work.

OH SNAP

Sigh, real programmers aren't defined by what they use to write their code.

Though nowadays, as daman says, most do use an IDE, just because it speeds everything up. I usually use geany (hate the logo and name, love the software) unless I'm using cpp (at which point I use code::blocks), personal preference.

Why on earth would you make that decision? O_o learn to compile.