text editors

[miriam_e]

What is your favorite? And why?

I do more text editing on my computers than anything else. Years ago I bought a copy of the most powerful and easy-to-use text editor I've ever found: TextPad, from textpad.com

Here are the main reasons I like TextPad:

• GUI-based
  
• uses regular expressions in its search and replace functions
  
• lets you create re-usable macros to automate sequences (they are not embedded in the document)
  
• has syntax highlighting for virtually every type of text file known
  
• you can easily create new syntax highlighting files, as they are just text
  
• and you can just as simply edit old ones to improve them
  
• it has "clip libraries" of commonly used items which can be inserted into the working text by simply double-clicking the item in the clip list (for instance I use it to insert pieces of POVRay code into a scene I'm writing, or html elements into a web page)
  
• you can easily create your own clip libraries, as they are simply text
  
• you can just as simply edit old clip libraries
  
• there is no limit to the size of a clip item, for instance one of my clip libraries contains all the VRML nodes and a lot of commonly used fragments, and one of the clip list items is an entire basic VRML scene, with some simple object nodes, lighting, sound nodes, fog, and so on... all in one of the clip items
  
• almost any aspect of TextPad's operation can be altered to suit

TextPad does have 2 major drawbacks though:

• The macro language is closed and binary only, compiled by the program itself as you do the actions. Much better would be a text-based programming language like python, that can be tweaked and altered easily
  
• TextPad is MSWindows only, and I have almost succeeded in moving entirely to Linux.
  

So, good people. What is your favorite text editor?

Comments

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I use vi, eternal text editor of the ages. Not that junky vim, though, nvi is my variant of choice.

I'm not a huge fan of syntax highlighting though.

By the way, if you switch to Linux, you may be able to run TextPad in a compatibility framework like wine, but the drawback is Linux and friends end their newlines differently to Windows, so any files that you create in TextPad may look funny in other Linux applications.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I've been researching and have downloaded vi. I'll try it out later today. I haven't heard of nvi.

Syntax highlighting makes programming much quicker by using the eye's neat pattern recognition facilities to help spot things. I initially didn't see the sense of it, having spent much time on the Amiga, where few editors use syntax highlighting, but since using it in TextPad I'd hate to do without it. It speeds my work greatly.

I was thinking of using wine for TextPad and my favorite MSWindows image viewer, Irfanview. I've had no success getting it to work yet, and I'd really prefer to use a native editor, especially if it can use a standard programming language to extend it.

TextPad can save files with line endings for MSWindows (CR-LF), Unix/Amiga (LF), or Mac (CR).

Thanks for your suggestion. I really appreciate it.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

vi usually refers these days to a number of editors that behave in a similar way. vim and nvi are variants, vim being more bloated and feature-laden than nvi. But they are compatible and both get the job done in pretty much the same way. There's usually a bit of a learning curve to vi since it behaves very differently to how you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it becomes very efficient.

You shouldn't need to download it for Linux, since it is a standard Unix program, but you will for Windows.

I find indenting and spacing things usually does the job for me when I program as opposed to syntax highlight.

I'm glad TextPad can use multiple line-endings; that nullifies the only problem I was thinking of!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to be able to say I've finally got Wine working on Puppy Linux -- it seems the installation was broken. Boy! The documentation for Wine is ass-around -- it takes 5 chapters of configuration and explanations before you get to how to run the damn thing. In the version I have there was no configuration file, and a lot of things seemed to be absent. After building a basic config file I have a feeling it would have worked fine without it. Oh well... it works now.

It is nice to have the wonderful capabilities of irfanview if I need them. Xnview does most things irfanview does, but there are a number of nice things I've grown used to having in irfanview.

TextPad finally works on Puppy now too (via Wine) but I still feel like I want a native editor. I looked more at Vi. It seems very much like an editor I used on the Amiga which I used constantly. I found an extensible editor for Linux called Cute, which uses python as its extension language. This appeals to me greatly as I think python is by far the most sane language developed (I've learned more than a dozen computer languages in the past). I'll try out Cute. One of the things it says in its sourceforge page is that it has vi-like commands. hmmm...