Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« on: May 05, 2009, 12:09 AM »

ivery, just curious what kind of field are you in? Are you dealing with huge hex files, database files

Our systems input text files that have been produced from other systems. They are regularly in the 1-7 GB range.
Granted that it's not often that we would need to actually edit these files [as opposed to viewing and searching them], but in an ideal world the text editor would enable this function. i.e. you would not need to use a separate file viewer. Ultraedit handles this well, and Emeditor isn't far behind it.

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General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« on: May 04, 2009, 10:17 PM »

OK, I've downloaded Zeus [v 3.96s] with the intention of giving it a bit of time.

The Positives
Scripting looks to be very well implemented. record/save/edit/replay is intuitive and immediately useful.

Multi-line find/replace using regex works as it should.

block/column selection can be controlled by both keyboard and mouse. I wish that emeditor had keyboard control like Zeus, Ultraedit, Jedit, etc.

external tools can prompt for parameters before execution.

The Negatives
Unfortunately, I have given up on it fairly quickly. I'm sorry if this seems superficial and I hope that other users of this product respond with their positive experiences.

The help file lacks detail and also contains inaccuracies [see line wrap below]. There are options that I'm unfamiliar with and I could not work out their meaning from the help file [e.g. CUA mouse marking mode, Brief Column Paste mode, etc]. It's a trial and error exercise to work out what they are.

The column mode doesn't work as completely as in other editors. You cannot select a zero width column. You cannot type or paste text into each line of the selected column.

I could not for the life of me work out how to temporarily change the syntax [aka document type] of the current buffer. It seems to be bound to file extensions which, if true, is completely useless to me.

I could not find how to toggle word wrap [aka line wrap] on/off. According to the help file there should be an option in the edit menu, but it isn't there.
Therefore, I could not find out whether word wrap honored indentation levels. This is a very handy feature in some other editors.

The diff function doesn't display side by side and I couldn't find an option to change this behaviour.

Zeus has built-in sorting and can also extracting lines containing a search string. It does this by wrapping a gui dialog around the fgrep tool.

Sorry, couldn't find how to extract matching lines.

Opened 10-20MB files quickly but choked completely attempting to open a 1.4GB text file. Sounds extreme, but a basic requirement in my field.

No recent file list in File menu.

As previously mentioned, no print preview.

3

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« on: May 04, 2009, 07:34 AM »

Jussi Jumppanen
Thanks for your reply. It's always good to hear from the author's perspective.
I did trial Zeus a year or so ago and, to be honest, I can't recall why I dismissed it.
I may be confusing it with slickedit, but I seem to remember cost being an obstacle. Again, I'll check this out and re-post.
Admittedly, it is difficult to keep up because pro-active authors are keen to deliver updates but users are not always aware of them.
Apologies if, by not including it, I have sold your product short.  I will check it out again.
Stay tuned.

4

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« on: May 04, 2009, 07:25 AM »

It's been pointed out to me that Emeditor does support native file comparison.
Haven't checked this out yet but appologies in advance if my original post was in error.

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General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Of: text editors

« on: April 28, 2009, 07:51 AM »

Of the text editors that I have used seriously, here's a quick wrap.
[I've tried to exclude points already made in this thread]
UltraEdit
The Good
Under constant development
support requests are answered promptly
somewhat extensible through scripting - I don't think Activex objects are creatable though
large file handling

The Bad
recording and saving macros is very un-intuitive. I've been using this editor for around 10 years and just cannot understand why this hasn't been re-worked.
the ugly brown program icon
multiple regular expression engines supported - this should be a positive, but I find it a bit confusing when I have to switch between them occasionally.
finding stuff in the default menu structure and options screens is difficult.
Documentation of the scripting object model is flimsy at best.

Emeditor
The Good
one of my first tests when evaluating a text editor is it's ability to handle a multi-line regular expression search and replace. Emeditor handles this without problem or the need to learn an obscure flavour of regex.
very extensible.
large file handling
The Bad
no built in support for file comparison and the plug-in is clunky and basic.
other functionality provided by plugins are not as polished as the built-in versions in other editors. e.g. sorting, extracting lines containing a search string, etc.
same scripting documentation issues as Ultraedit [above]

JEdit
This is my personal favourite by a long way
The Good
macro recording, editing, storing, etc is the cleanest and most usable that I've seen
highly extensible via macros and plugins.
block selection mode just works. enable it temporarily when selecting via mouse, allows pasting from clipboard into selected block, zero width blocks, etc, etc.
multiple concurrent selections - when enabled, many non-contiguous text sections can be selected, copied, pasted, etc. I haven't seen this in any other text editor.
The Bad
takes a bit of time to set it up as, out of the box, it is fairly spartan.
Being java-based, it doesn't handle large files well.
For some reason, the font rendering on some low-end LCDs is pretty rough. I'm not sure if this is the fault of the JRE, Jedit or how I have configured stuff.
No print preview.
Pretty much any stumbling block has been met and overcome by someone else. The multitude of macros and plugins available will cover pretty much anything.
Plugins are especially useful for integrating with other tools, e.g. clearcase, scripting engines, command interpreters, etc, etc.

All three are mature, useful editors.
As stated by others, I can't find one editor that does everything that I need.
One day, maybe ....

6

Developer's Corner / Re: source editor that prints indentation guides

« on: April 26, 2007, 06:25 PM »

Thanks all
Eóin's suggestion seems the best at the moment. Not perfect but still better than what I'm doing at the moment.
Many thanks for all that took the time to reply.
Any further suggestions appreciated.

7

Developer's Corner / Re: source editor that prints indentation guides

« on: April 26, 2007, 12:35 AM »

Thanks CPilot for the suggestion.

I tried Scite and found that the indentation guides don't get printed.
[unless there's an option to enable it somewhere]

Basically, I want to print out legacy code with the indentation guides for reviewing.

8

Developer's Corner / source editor that prints indentation guides

« on: April 25, 2007, 09:00 PM »

Hope this is the correct forum to post to.

Does anyone know of a text editor that will print source code with vertical lines as indentation/column guides?
I've seen some that display column guides on screen but don't print them out.

thanks in advance.