There’s a poll on Lifehacker about text editors. Their top six are Notepad++, Emacs, UltraEdit, TextMate, Vim, and TextPad. I do use TextMate on my Mac, so I agree with that call. It’s a nice editor. I *wish* I was proficient with Emacs, just because it would probably come in handy occasionally, and just generally seems like something I should know. I’m amazed that people still use vi/vim. I had to use vi a bit back in college, and never liked it. Under Windows, I have to admit that I’m still using Multi-Edit, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days. I’ve been using Multi-Edit 9, which dates back to 1999. I kept putting off upgrades, since ME 9 did everything I really needed to do. At some point, I realized that I needed an editor with Unicode support, so I installed PSPad. I like PSPad, but not enough to switch over from Multi-Edit, except for those occasional Unicode files.
After poking around on the internet a bit today, I decided to finally upgrade to the most current version of Multi-Edit. It seems like ME is still behind the times a bit. The current version is called “Multi-Edit 2006”, and the most recent revision was posted in October 2007. It mostly works in Vista, but there are a couple of problems, mostly with macro recording, from what I can tell by looking at their support forums. And they’ve got some support for Unicode now, but it doesn’t look like it’s really full support.
I’m not sure if sticking with Multi-Edit is the right choice in the long run. UltraEdit might be a better choice; they seem to have been updating their product a bit more regularly. They appear to have full Unicode support and Vista compatibility.
Only a true geek could spend so much time worrying about text editors!
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