However, after reading some of the forum, it appears that Zeus has been (and may still be) using an older regular expression engine. Is this still true?

-widgewunner (April 17, 2009, 02:49 PM)

Zeus uses a unix/perl style of regular expression engine. Another user suggested the engine in Zeus is old, but I've never really understood what it is that makes an engine old or new?

Recently I wrote a C# project that made extensive use of the Microsoft C# regular expression object. All the regular expressions used in that project where written and tested in Zeus and they worked just fine in the C# regular expression object. 

Many editors allow you to define user tools, but they often invoke them by means other than a command shell.  If there's no command shell, there's (as I understand it) no access to STDIN/STDOUT and the redirection process,

-rjbull (April 16, 2009, 04:01 AM)

Zeus runs its tools as a hidden process and captures the STDOUT/STDERR output of the tool to a tool window within the editor. But it does not hook in to the STDIN of the tool so there is no way for the user to talk to the tool from within Zeus.

To get STDIN working from within Zeus requires something like Tee: http://www.zeusedit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=74

By contrast, consider TED Notepad.  It presumably uses a hidden command shell, because you can define STDIN/STDOUT filters as user tools.

Since TED Notepad hooks in to STDIN I assume that means you can type inside of TED Notepad and that input is sent to the tool. That is nice :Thmbsup:

(You can) mark a block of text, hit the hotkey for that tool, and have the transformed text over-write the existing block.  Very convenient.

It's possible run a tool from within a Zeus script and since scripts can be written in Python, Lua, JavaScript, VBScript, even Tcl, with a bit of scripting it is possible to do almost anything with the tool output.

The latest version of Zeus is a 10 Mb download - not that out of the way nowadays

Zeus itself is only about 800 kBytes but it ships with 19 other dlls that are about 6 megs in size. But of those 19 dlls only about 3 are essential and in fact reset can even be deleted.

but many competent editors are much smaller and presumably faster loading

Zeus starts in less than a second and it can open a 15 meg file in about 3 seconds. Normal files open in less than a second to load.

I'm sure one gets what one pays for, but it might be too much for me.  On the other hand, if I'd bought it first, maybe I wouldn't be on this quest.

Zeus costs nothing to try and the trial version is fully functional and runs for 45 days ;)

I've just been looking at a few more Windows editors. Originally, I
 was looking for these features:
 
 Automatic back-ups
 Bookmarks
 Edit multiple files (tabbed interface?)

Zeus has all these feature: http://www.zeusedit.com

Ability to specify filters as external user tools (most seem  to unable to cope with redirection symbols)

I am not exactly sure what you mean by a redirection filter?

When the editor runs an external tool it will put in it's own hook to capture the output. If you redirect this output there will be nothing for the editor to capture.

In almost all the Windows editors I've seen, you have to use the mouse, or Shift-arrow keys, to mark text.

Zeus has several marking options including line, block, column, ragged or cua marking modes.

The marking can be done using just the keyboard, just the mouse or a combination of both.

If you press almost any other key, you lose the marked area and have to start again.

This is a Windows standard so I suspect that is why most windows editors do this. But in Zeus this is configurable.

Compare this with WordStar-style editors.

FWIW Zeus has a WordStar keyboard emulation mode.

True, I believe Boxer and TED Notepad both have limited work-arounds, but not as good.

If the Zeus WordStar emulation is broken then I would suggest reporting it as a bug to the Zeus forum:

   http://www.zeusedit.com/forum

Do Windows editors really have to be so bad?

Definitely not and I don't think all of them are ;)

Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus for Windows IDE