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The Best Of: text editors
mxn:
All of you have missed one very very very good editor which should be covered also:
E-TextEditor. Contains whole a lot great features and supports almost too many different formats....:)
Worth of checking, IMHO!-simakuutio (April 28, 2009, 12:05 AM)
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I tried E-TextEditor a few years back but uninstalled it immediately. To use its advanced features you need Cygwin, and Cygwin installed 760 MB in 44 136 files. That's about twice as many files as I currently have in my program files folder, with 200 applications installed.
tranglos:
Very nice review but I wonder does any of them have my dream-like functionality: live filter with column mode
-fenixproductions (April 27, 2009, 05:24 PM)
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I don't think so. I agree it would be very useful. Have you found it anywhere else?
Perhaps pick an editor that already does column selection, and pester the author to add live filtering - it would be a pretty rare feature, hence a selling point.
You already know that EditPad Pro will fold text and show only matching lines. What I didn't notice until yesterday is that there is a "Copy visible lines" command under the Fold menu (not where you typically look for clipboard commands). It does what it says: after a search and fold, it will copy only the matching lines without the remainder of the paragraphs.
TextPad lets me do the same more easily with its full support for clipboard operations on bookmarked lines. Neither solution is as good as live filtering, but both can be used to extract the matches, perhaps to analyze them in a separate editor tab.
tranglos:
I tried E-TextEditor a few years back but uninstalled it immediately. To use its advanced features you need Cygwin, and Cygwin installed 760 MB in 44 136 files. That's about twice as many files as I currently have in my program files folder, with 200 applications installed.
-mxn (April 28, 2009, 05:50 AM)
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I'm curious as to what e can do with Cygwin. Since you can write JavaScript and VBScript code for EmEditor, you can probably do as much there - but I'd still like to find out more about e.
As for the installation, Cygwin can be significantly trimmed down. You only need the executables and the library folders. Other folders contain documentation (which you can zip up to save space) and a lot of source code (which you can delete). I think you can trim it by more than half.
utility man:
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 ....
rjbull:
tranglos, great post! I'm glad I inspired something ;)
I've concluded I'll never find a Windows text editor I'm really happy with, because I don't like the way Windows works. Like you, I find that many seem to be oriented mainly towards programmers, and I'm not a programmer. Again like you, I find I want macros I can edit. My problem is that not being a programmer, it had better be a simple macro language, with enough details in the editor's Help file. I don't want to have to learn Javascript, Lua or whatever just to program the editor.
Incremental search: what is that?
Search and replace in multiple files: I routinely have to make the same replacements if multiple files, so I use a multi-file search-and-replace program, now usually HFFR Text Workbench. This is claimed to do unicode and Word files, amongst other things, though I haven't tried those features yet.
Text clips: an interesting idea, depending on what's meant by it. I have a variety of programs for text expansion and completion if I want them, and at least completion is included in many editors. Many other programs offer text clips and templates, e.g. AceText (which I haven't tried) by the author of EditPad Pro (payware), and freewares like Konrad Pappala's Ka TypeIn. It's simple, but allows you to add your own named variables in templates, e.g. "firstname", "lastname". As a very simple trial, I made one for quoting URLs in DC's SMF. Then there's mouser's own Form Letter Machine (again I haven't tried it), and some template functionality is offered by most clipboard enhancers, like ArsClip and the clipboard module in Comfort Keys by Comfort Software. That one is so clever you can build little menus with it.
Short comments a few editors I've tried recently:
* Boxer: abandoned because it doesn't wrap text to the window, so can't see long lines
* EmEditor: abandoned (at least for now) as a consequence of its license. If you use it at work, you exhaust the terms of the license, even if you purchased the license with your own money. The workaround is to install it as portable - but it's crashed on me a couple of times when I've done that, not during basic editing, but when fiddling with macros and configuring. That may not be EmEditor's "fault," but whatever the reason, if it crashes, I can't depend on it.
* PsPad: didn't quite "click," and crashed when making extensive use of the clipboard facility.
* Notepad++: much improved since I last looked at it. Still some glitches, e.g. the only way to make it recognise the AWK syntax file was to uninstall it, then reinstall it as portable: no accelerator keys on some menus; macros saves as XML, which means some folk can edit them, but I can't. Please could there be a free-standing menu-driven macro editor, or something?
* HippoEdit: first impressions are it works well, looks nice, friendly forums, developer working hard, but (apart from no macros yet) it's positioned as a programmer's editor more than a general text editor, which is what I need more. I think the Help file could do with some work, too. It tells you what can be done, but it often isn't obvious how to do it. E.g., there doesn't seem to be a menu item (that I could see) for wrapping text, that's on a button.
* Zeus 3.94a (free): installed, took one look, wow, that's one hardcore programmer's editor!
What I actually use:
DOS editor/word processors VDE and PC-Write, largely because I'm used to them, but also because they're WordStar command set. One more nice thing about WordStar: bookmarks are to the character, not just to the line. Infinitely more useful for editing text. When I do Windows editors, currently it's TED Notepad and/or Crimson Editor, depending on what I'm doing. Lately Notepad++ has been coming up on the outside.
One other note: while the NoteTab editors don't seem to have much mindshare on DC, NoteTab Pro is due on Bits du Jour at half price on Monday 4th May 2009.
[edit]
Forgot to add, there's also The Semware Editor (TSE), another with little mindshare on DC, and another I haven't tried.
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