The Best Of: text editors

The following was inspired by the recent DC thread Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?, and by the new (to me) HippoEdit text editor, which is surprisingly inventive for an editor this young. Rather then reviewing a single application here, I thought of pinpointing the features I find best in the several text editors I use daily. Then I though of listing some of the worst features as well, so this thread should be properly called The Best (And The Worst) Of (Some) Windows Text Editors (With Screenshots), For Your Entertainment.

I've only listed some of the stand-out features - those that are unique to an editor, are particularly impressive or useful, or those I cannot live without. I did not list features that are too common to mention these days (word wrap, auto indent), unless a specific implementation of a common feature seemed particularly inspired (or particularly not so).

I should also note that there is a lot I don't do with text editors. I almost never use them to write executable code. I never use persistent blocks or any implementation of text clips (I use AHK for text expansion and configuring the same set of clips separately in each editor sounds too much like work). Apart from writing short notes to self, I use text editors to search, replace, tweak or extract text and tags, often in xml files, from small to quite large (tens of megabytes). I thus pay much attention to speed and efficiency of editing large files and to the display capabilities that help visualize and navigate the thicket of tags and entities. I use regular expressions heavily and love incremental search. Finally, correct handling of Unicode is a must in my line of work, so editors that do well there score points with me (and TextPad, which does not, serves mostly as a scratchpad).

Since it's a long post, I might as well reveal right away that the moral of the story is nothing groundbreaking - there is no optimal editor, even given my limited range of uses. I have registered copies of all the editors listed here, and use them all interchangeably, since none does it all. Of course the other moral of the story is that all authors of the editors mentioned herewith should bow before this post daily and start implementing the missing best-of features posthaste, to one-up the competition. Or better still, five-up them.