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The Best Of: text editors
rjbull:
Is it not possible to keep the text plain and still use macros, pattern substitutions and paragraph manipulations etc?
-MilesAhead (April 29, 2009, 04:18 PM)
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Maybe. I've been spoilt because the first DOS programs I used were PC-Write, and later VDE, both of which are dual-purpose and both of which do work like that. Then Windows became popular, and that was the real beginning of a divide between editors and word processors. I've been focussed on editors because I use plain text almost all the time, and that's what editors do. I'd hate to try using Word for plain text, short notes, batch files, AWK scripts, anything like that. Microsoft Word? Bah! Ptui!
superboyac:
I just tried Hippo. It's fast, i like that. I do very minimal programming, just if I need to edit css files or php code a little. So, I don't have hardcore needs. Sometimes, I'll need to do some fancy search and replacing. So I guess speed is important to me.
Is it me, or is Ultraedit getting slower to load? I just installed it on my brand new smokin computer and it takes a good 2-3 seconds to completely load. Hippo opens immediately.
superboyac:
OK, I just tried EmEditor...it is REALLY fast. The fastest one I've tried as far as loading. I like it a lot.
tranglos:
thanks for comparison and thread ;) It gives some ideas what people need more.
-hippoedit (April 28, 2009, 05:47 PM)
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Hi Alex, thanks so much for joining and replying.
I really like HippoEdit so far, which is probably apparent in my report :) I do hope you can enable the visual guidance features for XML, too, since this is a very common file format. (Note that some of the related options are still enabled for XML under Tools -> Syntax settings, even though they are not currently supported).
A word about scripting, if I may. First, I think there is no real difference between scripting and macros. Conceptually, a macro is something you record, while a script is what you type in code. But the end result should ideally be the same: a listing of commands or executable statements that you can edit.
The ability to edit a recorded macro is very important to me. The more complex the macro, the more likely it is I'll make a mistake while recording. Having to begin everything from scratch or not being able to improve the macro later is a real bummer (see TextPad). I doin't particularly care what syntax you pick for the scripts; my only suggestion would be to use an existing language rather than invent something completely new. EmEditor does well with JavaScript and VBScript, since both languages are very communicative (easy to read), both are widely known and both are fairly easy to pick up the basics of.
It's great to know I can assign multiple shortcuts to a single action - thanks for that. In fact, the keyboard customization dialog box is very well organized, IMO. Thanks for making it resizable, it's much easier that way.
I don't have a lot of new suggestions right now, except maybe to steal a few useful little features from other editors. When editing any tagged format, I like the single-key commands to select (a) the whole tag; (b) the whole contents between a matching pair of tags; (c) a matching pair of tags including the content in between. That's very useful when restructuring a document.
For html and xml editing, the ability to automatically insert a closing tag would help a lot; an even better refinement is "synchronized editing" of tags (when I edit the opejning element name, the program applies the changes to the closing element - please see my description of that feature under the section for Oxygen XML Editor). I would say this is more important for xml than for html, because the tags in xml are "undefined", and because they are case-sensitive. So any automation in this respect helps avoid structural errors in xml.
I see HE uses the 0-9 bookmark scheme, but do you think it would be possible in the future to have either unlimited bookmarks, or a different implementation that would allow users to perform editing operations on bookmarks lines (or on all lines containing a search term)? Again, there's a more detailed description of that feature in my original post (under TextPad). TextPad's solution is pretty unique so far, but it could be improved further by allowing more types of operations on the marked lines, e.g. replace text a with text b only in those lines. What do you think?
(Thanks also for your kind offer. I do already own a license.)
MilesAhead:
Is it not possible to keep the text plain and still use macros, pattern substitutions and paragraph manipulations etc?
-MilesAhead (April 29, 2009, 04:18 PM)
--- End quote ---
Maybe. I've been spoilt because the first DOS programs I used were PC-Write, and later VDE, both of which are dual-purpose and both of which do work like that. Then Windows became popular, and that was the real beginning of a divide between editors and word processors. I've been focussed on editors because I use plain text almost all the time, and that's what editors do. I'd hate to try using Word for plain text, short notes, batch files, AWK scripts, anything like that. Microsoft Word? Bah! Ptui!
-rjbull (April 30, 2009, 03:55 AM)
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I guess the only thing worse than a proprietary format is one that keeps changing with every version. I don't do much with text appearance 'cept when I did my web page. Even there I learned just enough css and used a nav button maker so that I could do the page without using a word processor. That "front page of the newspaper" look is kind of old. It may be useful if you need to cram lots of stuff on your page but I'd hate to look at the page source when made with one of those front end apps. Like twenty br tags and fifty ampersands in a row.. that kind of crap.
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