Komodo is Free!
… well, kinda.
ActiveState, the folks who brought us ActivePerl and ActivePython, have finally decided to do the right thing and make an editor freely available to the public. In a move similar to what BareBones Software did a few years back with BBEdit and TextWrangler, ActiveState have decided to offer a branch of Komodo as a free product, dubbed “Komodo Edit“.
If you have ever used SciTE (another great editor) before, you’ll recognize a distinctive look and feel to the editing environment (is it Scintilla based?). They won’t call this an IDE, but it has a feature set which will make you want to call it that: projects, multi-document editing, macros, folding, syntax checking, code hints and completion. The list goes on. Two features that blew me away instantly were VI key bindings (that won my heart), and native support for the YUI.
Props go to ActiveState for finally doing this. Komodo is truly a great IDE but because of it’s price ($250 USD commercial, $49 USD students), it is out of the reach of a lot of people. This puts yet another great environment in the hands of developers.
Be sure to give this editor a try. One word of warning to first-time installers: the installer selfishly assumes control over all your source documents without asking permission. I can’t verify this on Windows, only on my Mac.
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