I’ve tried a number of times to write up a comparison of my favourite text editors, showing which features each one has. However, this is a long and complicated job that nobody will pay me to do. As a result, I’m going to keep a list of the problems that cause me to switch away from a certain editor. This at least will stop me switching back and forwards between editors – not because they’ve improved, but because I’ve forgotten why they were bad.
[2008-03-06] The first entry goes to PSPad, which treats underscores and dashes as word-separators, so when selecting text, ‘ab-sol_utely’ looks like three words.
[2008-07-08] Notepad++ is a very capable editor with good word completion and syntax highlighting, as well as pretty much everything else I’d want. However, the ways it decides which directory to open and save files in are just not right – there are two options. I’ve selected both at different times and neither do the right thing. Most of the other editors must get it right, because I just don’t even notice them. Also, the regex search can’t find and replace newlines. Switching between large files can be slow.
[2008-07-08] e text editor now correctly deals with words containing underscores, but its Python highlighter still gets confused by triple-quoted strings. Bit of a school-boy error for a python editor.
[2008-08-01] Intype looks promising, but is lacking tons of features at the moment. Will check back in a year or so.
[2008-08-04] UltraEdit now has SFTP file access, which works a treat. However, it still sometimes mis-highlights triple-quoted strings in Python. Where’s my ‘get off the stage’ klaxon gone? Grr. Also has a weird thing where it sometimes doesn’t quite display all of a character. For example, an ‘e’ followed by ‘.’ is missing the last row of pixels on the right hand side. None of their fancy anti-alias settings seems to help. I ended up increasing the font size (using my programming font of choice, Anonymous). Also, the ‘open’ dialogue takes a long time to appear. Not a showstopper, but annoying.
[2008-10-30] I’m rather enamoured with jEdit at the moment. I’ve tried it many different times before, and it seemed so… javaish. However, it now has anti-aliasing; startup options that make for quick opening; a Windows-ish theme; a tab-bar and open-document-pane plugin; sensible word-wrap (per open document, rather than global); good regex support (deals well with newlines); good triple-quoted-string handling; a hex-edit plugin; auto-complete; a column marker. It’s even quite pretty.
