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The Best Of: text editors

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tranglos:
Could you tell me what you use a text editor for if not for programming?  If that's true, then i'm in the same situation as yourself.  But I don't know what features to look for in a text editor.  And i feel like everyone else that talks about text editors focuses on the programming, so i never can relate. 
-superboyac (April 27, 2009, 06:35 PM)
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I touched on that at the top of my article. I typed that very post in EmEditor (via this Firefox add-on). But the heavy-duty stuff I do is related to my work in translating software and websites. Often I review translations in xml and other formats, where the tags are dense and must not be damaged. Other times I make global changes in files, or extract text from in-between the tags, e.g. to do a proper spellcheck without the spellchecker stumbling on the tags and various codes. I clean up translation memories to generate glossaries for my own use, which involves stripping not only xml tags, but random RTF codes and similar crud. And I as I mentioned in the post, these files are often pretty big, and they are almost always Unicode.

So in my case it's not so much creating new files (whether prose or program code) - it's more of reading, navigating, searching for and replacing stuff, doing all sorts of tweaks and transformations. That's also why I need capable macros, or better, editable scripts to automate tasks and adapt to changes.

I should say that most people in my line of work probably don't do all the stuff I do. There are specialized tools for localization, which I also use, but they are awfully limited in their editing capabilities (and forget about macros). There are things that I can do much faster in a text editor, and there are things which I would be entirely unable to do without one. For example, I sometimes need to edit parts of files which the professional translation tools (hundreds of Euros per license) won't even let me touch. I also use a dictionary program I wrote (called Tranglos - my domain was set up to publish it), and for that I need to convert from or clean up various bilingual files. I've written a converter, but often I use regular expressions in a text editor to prepare files, even if it's just to change the structure of a file because it's faster than recompiling my converter :)

Speed of keyboard operation also counts, since I sell my time. Any function that's not keyboardable means I take longer to finish a task. That's one reason I love EmEditor's way of assigning more than one key combination to a function: that way I can have four (4) different ways to invoke Find (I use three of them commonly, without thinking of which to use or why). It's also why EditPad Pro's search, though powerful and visually pleasing, throws me off a little, since it's designed more to be used with the mouse.

I try to use the most convenient tool for a job. I won't fire up Oxygen to edit a word in an xml file - EmEditor is fine for that; but Oxygen is very helpful when I need to figure out the structure of a large xml file, or validate one, make global changes or extract whole blocks of xml.

I hope my post doesn't come across as a bunch of complaints. It's fun to juggle all those editors and discover what they can do - and the Grid view in Oxygen (pictured in one of the screenshots) is truly a sci-fi kind of beauty.

superboyac:
I hope my post doesn't come across as a bunch of complaints. It's fun to juggle all those editors and discover what they can do - and the Grid view in Oxygen (pictured in one of the screenshots) is truly a sci-fi kind of beauty.
-tranglos (April 27, 2009, 07:28 PM)
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Not at all!  I loved the post, very nicely said.  I'm just like you as far as software goes, I want the most efficient program possible and time is money.  All software is basically a toolbox to make life more productive and help you gain time for things that are truly human functions.

Well, your needs are very specific.  if I run across something that helps, I'll be sure to post it here.

MilesAhead:
Also if you have more time than money you can get XEmacs, some Windows ports of vi, and edt.  There was a cool fast free Dos editor called BlackBeard. The thing that was unique about it at the time was it did column cut & paste.

Also very small for putting on a WinPE or other emergency disk with real Dos programs for editing small files.

The nice thing about XEmacs for Windows is it has the menus to click with the mouse until you learn the hotkey combinations and commands.

One thing that drives me crazy is editors that don't have a pattern match search & replace that lets you append to the found pattern. I believe the DEC EDT had this ability and I'm sure a lot of the unix/linux editors do too. Coming from Dos/Windows I get frustrated jumping in and out of edit mode like in vi.  When I was doing Linux a lot I used it just enough to see that if you kept up with it you could rock & roll.  Commands to rework whole regions of files and shuffle the paragraphs around etc... if you could keep from ripping your hair out while learning it. :)

Shades:
Some days ago I was made aware of the existence  of an older XML editor, called XML Marker. Unfortunately, but it seems there is no active development going on, but after trying it I was pleasantly surprised about the size of the installation software (1 Mbyte),  the four views it gave me from the test XML file that was fed to it and the fact that it was Java-less freeware.

What I gathered from the overview was that the author was not happy with the XML editor because it was Java based and happy because of the views. XML Marker is able to whip up the same views plus one extra...from what I saw during my 5 minutes of "testing the application". Maybe a contender for the throne currently held by Oxygene XML editor?  :)

erikts:
There was a cool fast free Dos editor called BlackBeard. The thing that was unique about it at the time was it did column cut & paste.-MilesAhead (April 27, 2009, 08:45 PM)
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I am searching for BlackBeard and found this interesting page:

TextEditors Wiki

I frequently use Editor² to replace MS Windows' Notepad.

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