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Favorite Text Editor, a revisit

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mrainey:
Have used UltraEdit for the past seven years.  It still meets my needs perfectly.  And no, it's not perfect.   ;D

allen:
I've already mentioned it in half a dozen threads, but I'm absolutely stuck on EditPad Pro.  It has all the basic and not-so-basic features you'd expect from a text editor.

Most big text/programming editors have generally the same feature set, the real difference is a matter of subtlety--what you need and/or what you're used to.  For me, the real kickers--what keeps me with the same program--is not so much the features but the editor itself.  It's text editing engine in general really feels like its first and foremost purpose is text processing -- everything else is gravy.  From efficient keyboard navigation to conversion routines to the absolute best regex support on the market. (Regex find/replace features a multi-line text entry area with syntax hilighting, much better than the single <30 char input box most offer) -- and a key thing for me is (optional) persistent selections and inherent add ons to it (ctrl+m to move the selection to your cursor, ctrl+d to duplicate the selected text, etc.).

A few other perks for me -- most of the features are available  settings can be stored in an ini file making the application totally portable, there's an application for making custom syntax hilighting schemes (comes in handy for proprietary data formats I use now and again), syntax aware live spelling, external tools -- and whatever else you might think of.  The few things that weren't there are implemented in the upcoming version 6 -- whose beta is really stable and sexy, right now :)

Finally, to my delight, the text processing engine for EditPad is also in JGSoft's other applications--which also integrate into one another in a number of ways, making for a great family of familiar applications--RegexBuddy, Power Grep, AceText -- most of which I use ceaselessly, daily.  I feel like a marketeer, at this point . . . I've just been using JGSoft's applications for too long . . . :)

For quickly previewing text, on the other hand, I usually just use Editor2, which is bundled with xplorer2. TED Notepad is nice, too.  My biggest complaint with minimalist editors -- TED, metapad, editor2 -- they all use the registry to store their settings, which drives me nuts.  I like to have the option to drop it on my flash drive and go.

Rover:
I used Boxer for a lot of years (and I changed the color scheme).  I started with Boxer for DOS, the OS/2 and now Windows.  It has every stinking feature you'd want in an editor and is still being updated. 

See it here: http://www.boxersoftware.com/

zridling:
Although I've used EditPlus and EmEditor quite a bit, and even PSPad for a while, I keep going back to UltraEdit because of its text and file handling abilities. No other editor can open large files with ease, and though most people work with smaller files, my contract work has me working with large database files, and among those Gb-sized monsters, UltraEdit is a boon.

taichimaster:
I also found EmEditor is best for my use.  Used to use PSPad before that.

I like EmEditor's ease of use, search term highlighting, javascript/vbscript macro lang, and the excellent unicode and foreign codepages support.  Of course it also has all the standard stuff like regex search, find in files, brackets matching, column selection etc.  Though PSPad is more feature-rich on the programming side with its code explorer, SQL formatter, color dropper, checksum generator etc.

I have also tried UltraEdit.  I found that it has A LOT of options and some of them are kind of confusing.  I found EmEditor's options are more clear.

Another thing with UltraEdit is if you open up an UTF8 file and switched to HEX mode, it wouldn't really show you the correct raw bytes.  It internally converts the file from UTF8 to UTF16 and displays the bytes in UTF16 encoding instead!!!! The filesize is also displayed incorrectly because of the conversion.

I emailed their support and got a reply saying UltraEdit needs to do the internal conversion because some Windows OSes don't support UTF8 natively.  When the file is saved it will be converted back to UTF8 correctly.

Well, while I understand the platform limitation, I argue that a "real" hex viewer/editor should not need to have any knowledge of the underlying encoding and should just display and write out the raw bytes.  But I guess it's not really designed to be used as a real hex editor.

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