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

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I also use vi. Used to use it under BSD and SysV Unix in the early 80's, then under DOS. I still use a DOS version of it under Windoze. As already noted, there are a number of vi variants under Linux, of which nvi is the neatest and closest to the real thing.

I like it because it's fast, extremely capable (regular expressions, macros, etc) with very few keystrokes, non-GUI, available for any system and has piles of useful options (auto-indent, text wrapping at arbitrary column width, etc). A really great one for programming is the ability to have tag files (which keep track of where every routine is in your programs) and automatically jump to editing the file containing that routine if you ask it to. (However, you have to run something to generate the tags file(s), such as ctags for c program files.)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

This really is making me think vi is worth further exploration. One thing I miss greatly with TextPad is a ctags-like function on my favorite editor, dme, on the Amiga which let me look up a command from my program text. It was great! When I couldn't remember the options for some obscure command I simply highlighted it in the text and told it to do the look-up. After finding out what I wanted I'd close the reference and continue editing. Brilliant! If I can get Vi or some variant of it to do that then I'll be one happy possum!

Another nice thing dme had was the ability to make two different kinds of macros. One consisted of strings of internal dme key commands, which look similar in some ways to the Vi commands -- they can be entered directly in command mode or run from a separate file. The other kind of macro was using the Rexx language.

Almost all programs on the Amiga have Rexx access so you could easily string multiple smaller programs together to make far more capable ones (for instance I used to like running my text editor to control the paint program in order to make mathematical shapes, then output the result back to the text editor as VRML code -- all in realtime. You can't do anything like this on Windows, and I haven't yet seen a way to do it on Linux. (sigh)