Text Editors

I spent some time looking at text editors tonight. I’m currently using an old version of Multi-Edit for most of the work that isn’t done directly in Visual Studio, PowerBuilder, or dbArtisan. (Which isn’t much really, but it’s still enough to worry about.) My only real beef with Multi-Edit is that it doesn’t have Unicode support. I was hoping that the newest version (9.10) of Multi-Edit would support Unicode, but it looks like that’s not going to happen until version 10.

Crimson Editor has Unicode support, and also supports a lot of languages (for syntax highlighting). It also has support for macros and column-mode editing, which are both essential.

UltraEdit looks interesting too. It’s got Unicode support, syntax highlighting, column mode, and macros. It doesn’t appear to support as many different languages as Crimson, though.

And of course, there’s always emacs. I’ve always wanted to learn emacs. Right now, I just know enough to get in, do some fundamental editing, and get out. A deep understanding of emacs is something I could actually put on my resume.

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