Wednesday 14 February 2007 — This is almost 18 years old. Be careful.
I spend much of my day working in a text editor, so I’m pretty sensitive to how well it does (or doesn’t) work. I’m always on the lookout for new entrants into the field, hoping for the perfect Windows programmer’s editor.
Over the past few years, I’ve used (and paid for) a number of editors that came close, but which ultimately disappointed in some way, most recently Zeus, EditPad Pro, and TextPad. There are also a dozen more that I’ve downloaded and played with enough to see that they weren’t for me: Alleycode, Boxer, ConTEXT, Cream, Crimson Editor, e, EditPlus, Emacs, EmEditor, Jed, jEdit, Notepad++, PSPad, Slickedit, UliPad, Ultra-Edit, vim, Xint.
In the past month, two new possibilities have appeared:
Intype is a new editor modelled after the much-vaunted TextMate. They are only just getting started, but as an example of how much they are following the TextMate model, they’ve implemented bundles before most other things you need in an editor (tabbed interface, undo, etc).
Although Intype has a long way to go to be a complete editor, the first looks are promising: it is polished and thoughtful, and the team is conducting itself in the modern way (screencasts, forums, releasing often, etc). And the interest is quite intense: someone has written a project manager for Intype which hijacks Intype editor windows to present the tabbed interface Intype hasn’t built yet!
Overall Intype is very interesting, and I’ll be watching its progress.
Komodo Edit is a free subset of Komodo IDE. For my tastes, it chooses almost the exact right subset of features. For example, it doesn’t include Subversion integration, but I use svn from the command line anyway. It gets projects right: a directory spec, with file patterns to include and exclude dynamically. If the Find In Files features could search the files in a project, it would probably be perfect.
Comments
(Asks a Vim + Visual Studio guy)
The ActiveState guys are pretty responsive if you let them know about your feature requests.
"Find in project" will very likely appear in Komodo 4.1 (expected in a few months). As Brandon mentioned, please throw feedback our way.
I have looked at SciTE, but maybe I need to look at it again. It seemed kind of bare bones the last time.
I am interested in trying out the free Komodo however.
http://www.semware.com/
Yeah, the main page is a bit...active.
But it's a solid editor.
TSE, hailing its evolution all the way back to Qedit in the deep dark past (though significantly evolved since those days (rewritten at least once)).
It's "text" based, but I find that works better than "GUI" editors. It's a native Windows app, and pixel-based, just presents a text-style interface; no MDI or such. Supports native fonts, native print dialog and so forth (it _is_ a Windows app) so all the usual goodness is there.
I've been using it for about 20 years now.
Blazingly fast file load + save + search, plus all the usual amenities like full undo and regex and more. SAL (the script language) is very nice - powerful while being very approachable and flexible. [It's not Python, but no one's perfect :-]
A few minor nits -- e.g. regex is nice though not fully Perl5 -- but even so it's mighty sweet. I've looked at alternatives over the years and every time, the best I've found were almost tolerable, but I always keep going back to TSE.
You can download a testdrive of TSE Pro from their website.
Discovered e-texteditor http://www.e-texteditor.com/ today (20070308) and remembered your post. Maybe worth a test drive ...
Cheers,
EuGeNe
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