with Created Expression

PSPad is a freeware text and code editor that runs under Windows. It is available for download from http://www.pspad.com/en/. Although there are many editors (free and not) out there, this one includes working through "FTP". This means that you can, on your home machine, edit files (plural) residing on your web host server. And, this is excellent.

Let's say that there's something you wish to change or work on in one of the styling sheets used by your site. You could...

1. run some FTP software on your home machine to copy the file from the web server to your home machine; open and edit the file with some text or code editor; go back to your FTP software and copy the file back to your web server


2. open a browser window; login to your web server's control panel; open the file manager; browse to the file in question; edit the file in question with the text editor provided
   
   


3. open a browser window; login to the adminstrator's section of your Joomla! installation; open Joomla!Xplorer; open and edit the file in question with the text editor provided
   
   


4. open PSPad; connect to your web server; open and edit the file with this code editor
   
   

There are two main advantages to the latter option. The first is that you can open several documents at the same time in this editor. If you wish to copy and paste things, if you wish to compare, if you wish to work on more than one file at at time, you can! The second advantage is that this is a "code" and not a simple text editor. This means that code is "understood". It is highlighted and formatted in a way that is visually easy to navigate and errors (things like unclosed tags) are displayed for you. And, being able to change the size of the editing window is not something to be sneezed at :o)