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

Re: Anothr vi user

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yes. Vi does look like an odd critter, though it is similar to an old Amiga editor I've always loved, and oddly it is very much like an editor I wrote many many years ago. I don't think I'd have a lot of problems adapting to it. My main concern is that after spending the time it could come up lacking in some of the things I value. Reading thru the manuals (haven't finished them yet) I can't see any reference to anything like the clip libraries I lean so heavily on in TextPad. That would be a big disadvantage and I can't see me sticking with an editor that lacks that or the ability to add it somehow.

Yes, I've seen the holy war between vi and emacs. :) I've used emacs and found it was not to my liking. I love that it can easily be extended virtually without limit, but the fact that it uses Lisp to do the extending is a major disadvantage. In my opinion Lisp is a dumb language. It is basically like FORTH, but backwards. FORTH is one of the fastest, most capable, but one of the weirdest languages ever developed, because it uses reverse polish notation. This means it can do away with parentheses entirely. Unfortunately Lisp does the opposite and as a result has an absurd proliferation of parentheses.

My current favorite language is python. I have found an editor called Cute that uses python as its extension language, but the editor relies upon Qt libraries (not happy about that) and certain functions rely on something called scintilla, which seems to be a python library for text editing functions.

So... still not sure about which way to go. Text editing is what I do more than anything else, so it is a big part of my computer time. Much rides on avoiding a suboptimal solution. Looks like I need to get more info and sit down and make a list like Benjamin Franklin (one of my heroes) suggests.

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.