The Old Joel on Software Forum - What's the best text editor?

What's the best text editor?

I couldn't take another H1B tirade, so I thought I'd start a religious war instead

ryan
Thursday, July 11, 2002

a pencil :)

apw
Thursday, July 11, 2002

ISPF option 2.

Joe AA.
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Dr. Scheme GUI. I gotta embrace & extend it for Python/Jython. And those Pilot Precise pens, extra fine nib. Outside of the US, they're Pilot "Hi-Tecpoint". The Hi-Tecpoints look flashy, but grow on you. Europeans I've informally surveyed seem to like it better.

Sammy
Thursday, July 11, 2002

JEdit

jedit user
Thursday, July 11, 2002

VIM and GVIM... on all platforms

~End()
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Brief on MSDOS.

Visual Slickedit on everything else.

Legal pad in the car.

Woodrow Stool
Thursday, July 11, 2002

ed, without hesitation. See:

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

Ori Berger
Thursday, July 11, 2002

TextPad is good stuff.

http://www.textpad.com

TextPad User
Thursday, July 11, 2002

My personal favourite (which doesn't get much press):

http://www.codegenie.com

Very small, tight, and simple.

Wayne Venables
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Go textpad. I even have csc.exe hooked into up-- no need for Visual Studio! (heh) Heck, I even PAID for textpad. Thats how good it is.

Vincent Marquez
Thursday, July 11, 2002

I second the vote for vim. It does plenty and runs nearly everywhere. Not easy to learn bu texceedingly easy to use. Good for most languages, configurable.

But I'm not sure it'd be worth the time to learn it to instinct-level again, if i had to start over.

Mike Swieton
Thursday, July 11, 2002

For development, USe n IDE, since you want intergrated debugging.

For Java, I've settled on Intellij IDEA. I moved to this from emacs. I've used MS VC++, VisualAge for Java, and NetBeans.

For quick and dirty text file changes, I use VI..

Yes, I use both VI and emacs.

adam
Thursday, July 11, 2002

"What's the best text editor? "

An H1B?

no, not really
Thursday, July 11, 2002

EDLIN

SZP
Thursday, July 11, 2002

UltraEdit

Bob Crosley
Thursday, July 11, 2002

UltraEdit, for sure.

I guess that pretty much settles it.

Hardware Guy
Thursday, July 11, 2002

second on Textpad.
* does all the basic stuff very well. (especially working with multiple files-- most text editors are not very usable editing 30 files at once).

* the reg exp search/replace is awesome.

* does a few critical advanced tasks (file compare, word count, sort, file content search).

* includes an ok hex editor

* has syntax definitions on the web site for about 50 languages/formats

* nice and cheap

Will Glass-Husain
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Sam, because of its structural regular expressions, its minimalist interface, and because the price is right.

How come nobody has yet mentioned emacs the all-powerful, emacs the all encompassing, not-just-an-editor-more-a-way-of-life? It usually shows up pretty early in this discussion.

Andrew Simmons
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Maybe both emacs and vi supporters have finally come to the conclusion that rest of us don't want to use awkward or byzantine editors just because they're free.

Naah...that can't be it.

Hardware Guy
Thursday, July 11, 2002

>>>How come nobody has yet mentioned emacs<<<

It has been mentioned twice before you got your post out, and I started on this before you posted.

Does anyone with emacs (or XEmacs) experience think any of these other editors have comparable capabilities? I might like to try another editor, but would not want to be without such features as file comparison, text filtering (i.e., running selected text region through grep, gawk, wc,...), and shell.

I do use vi.

And my KOH-I-NOOR RAPIDOMATIC with 0.5mm lead and a MAGIC RUB eraser get a lot of use, too.

mackinac
Thursday, July 11, 2002

I've used just about every editor mentioned so far, but my favorite by far is Visual SlickEdit.

Former Emacs User
Thursday, July 11, 2002

copy :con > myfile

James Ladd
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Intellij IDEA for anything Java-related and EditPlus for the rest. UltraEdit is nice too but I still prefer EditPlus....

Patrick Ansari
Thursday, July 11, 2002

Jed. Can do everything that emacs can except eat all of your memory and swap space :-)

boo
Friday, July 12, 2002

You guys have got to try out Scite:

http://www.scintilla.org

Ged Byrne
Friday, July 12, 2002

TextPad unless you're using AmigaOS where I'd recommend TurboText. ;-)

Lennart Fridén
Friday, July 12, 2002

Windows: TextPad. (Yeah, I paid for it too. New job, 1st question "Can you buy me a copy of textpad?")

MS-Dos 5.0+: Edit.

MS-Dos 2.0+: Edlin

MS-DOS 1.0+: copy con

copy con rocked in 1985 ...

Matt H.
Friday, July 12, 2002

I'm fond of "metapad"
http://liquidninja.com/metapad/

It's a simple, small, free and effective Windows text editor. It does what a text editor should do, and not much else.

D. Fischer
Friday, July 12, 2002

Hello,

I really like Visual Slickedit. !! Have you test it ?

Warren B.
Friday, July 12, 2002

Hello

Ooops I miss the link http://www.slickedit.com/home.php

Warren B.
Friday, July 12, 2002

Araneae
http://www.araneae.com

And I'm impatiently waiting for v5.

Marty Eichelman
Friday, July 12, 2002

I second SLICKEDIT. It's the best editor I have ever used. Works great on most platforms and most languages.

Tom Vu
Friday, July 12, 2002

I third VisualSlickedit. It does most of the cool Emacs stuff for people like me are too lazy to learn how to use Emacs.

Erik Lickerman
Saturday, July 13, 2002

>http://www.slickedit.com/home.php

Yes a nice editor.

But why is their body text on their web site in fixed point Verdana 8 pt type?
I see so many sites using this absurdly illegible font size.
And since it is FIXED I can't press "Larger" to make it readible.
Fixed 8 pt text on web sites is LAME. And people who make websites with this sort of text don't know what the hell they are doing.

Ed the Millwright
Saturday, July 13, 2002

Ed -

worse- try looking at their site with Opera. Pretty shoddy for a company with such a multi-platform product

Erik Lickerman
Saturday, July 13, 2002

UltraEdit for simple Java/Perl coding,
jCreator Pro - for more serious Java programming

Evgeny Goldin
Sunday, July 14, 2002

Textpad is the first small editor I have paid for (its only $25). I like to open it up when I need to do basic hacking. Sometimes the power of and ide is not needed. There are quite a few of my own projects I have created using textpad and ant/make/nant/etc. I'm not religous about it but I like it.

Ian Stallings
Monday, July 15, 2002

$329 for a text editor!

http://www.slickedit.com/purchase/pu_pricing.php

Considering how many great freewares there are out their, what do they offer for the money?

Ged Byrne
Tuesday, July 16, 2002

And while we are trashing the Slickedit site, did anyone notice that the four small screenshot thumbnails at the bottom of the Overview page add a measly 1.1MB to the total page download size. They could have created higher quality thumbnails using 20KB.

http://www.slickedit.com/products/pr_products.php

Broadband Internet is getting more popular these days, but I sincerely hope that their editor is less generous on resources.

Jan Derk
Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Jan!!

You rock at finding that example.

318kb jpg screen images that should have been gif'd and color reduced PLUS illegible 8 pt font throughout the entire page.

Surely this is a perfect example of much that is wrong with web design today. After all that's not a fancy art site, but a site selling a plain old text editor. No text editor site needs 318kb images.

I firmly believe that all commercial web site developers should be required as a matter of professional competance to use 1 14.4 modem.

Also, many (non-game) shrinkwrap developers should be testing their software on 66 and 100Mhz machines. Can do development on a faster machine if one must but definitely need to regularly test on the slowest machine possible.

Ed the Millwright
Tuesday, July 16, 2002

On Windows, I use EditPad Pro for most of my programming. I must admit that I thoroughly enjoy DrScheme when programming in Scheme. When on a Unix machine, I usually use Emacs. I never learned to use Vi, though people seem to like it a lot. Really, command-oriented text editors never really appealed to me, probably because of my horrible experiences with Color ScriptsIt on the TRS-80 *shudder*.

Anon
Saturday, July 27, 2002