It depends on what kind of skin you are trying to do. For WindowBlinds, SkinStudio or just plain old notepad or objectedit. ObjectBar has it's own built in "editor", as does DesktopX iirc. I don't know about the other skin formats, but for anything text driven, I would use a syntax highlighting editor like objectedit.

There nothing special about editing xml or ini files, there are just text. Though there are some commercial editors geared toward manipulating xml files.

You could simply get by with notepad.

There are some freeware and shareware text editors out there. I used to have a list of them but I don't have one handy.

If you're looking for a good general purpose editor:

I use UltraEdit http://www.ultraedit.com It's shareware ($30) but its a really good editor with lots of features. I use it all the time.

TextPad is another editor that's simlar to ultra edit. It doesn't quite have all the features of Ultra Edit but its got a slightly cleaner interface. http://www.textpad.com. I think it's around $25.

Pesonally I'd love to have Visual Slick Edit (a high powered developer's editor) but its a whopping $300.

If you have a subscription to StarDock's Object Desktop, it too comes with an editor ObjectEdit.

For a long time I used Visual C++'s text editor for most stuff, but now I am using HTML Kit for most everything except C++. It has syntax highlighting for PHP and a ton of other formats,and you can make your own plugins and syntax add-ons. It has an insane amount of tools, many of which I haven't gotten around to using after a year of using the product. It is not like dreamweaver or wysiwyg edirot, it is built for people who do it all by hand.

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/start/


Good stuff, and free. You can do C++ and such with it, too, but I'm still more comfortable in VC++'s editor for that.