Looking for a decent text editor

[kacir]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Ya'll just jealous of the sheer awesomeness of :wq.

<Esc>ZZ is even quicker than <Esc>:wq ;-)
And you do not have to move your fingers when typing ZZ

Originally Posted by frabjous

But seriously, it's not so bad. I've been vimming for less than a year, and even after a couple months, everything else annoys me in its non-vimmish-ness. I've had to install pentadactyl in Firefox so I can stand browsing now.

[G]Vim is great, GREAT editor.
There is only one small feature that is found in other editors and isn't present in Vim.

It has absolutely fabulous documentation.
When it comes to Regular expressions, Vim has perhaps the most comprehensive implementation.

It does have relatively steep learning curve, when comparing to Notepad, but a fighter jet air plane or Formula 1 racing car do take more learning than a golf cart.


Besides, *all* other editors I have to use have strange bug. They tend to leave random strings where I started or finished editing. An example is 'ZZ' 'I' 'a' 'dd7jp' and even ':wq' sometimes.

Send me a PM if you need a place to start learning Vim or more propaganda ;-)

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by kacir

<Esc>ZZ is even quicker than <Esc>:wq ;-)
And you do not have to move your fingers when typing ZZ

And even faster than <Esc>:wq<Enter>

But I don't think I'll ever get used to ZZ, the advantage of :wq is that you can see it before hitting enter, though I guess I could try using :x instead.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Jellby

And even faster than <Esc>:wq<Enter>

Touché

I am not one of people that have to save a keystroke, whatever the cost. What *I* like about Vim is its support for Regular Expressions, scripting language, macros, and commands like :g, :v, :s. Also the way how the commands combine with "objects" (such as "A Line", "a parenthesis", "A string up to /whatever", "A Sentence", "A Comment"). Oh ... and syntax highlighting that harnesses the full power of Regular Expressions engine.

I also like that it can remember *long* history of commands and strings you have searched for.

The capabilities of Vim are so huge that everybody can find something special and unique there.

An illustration. Comand <Esc>:help index<Enter> brings out an index of all EX commands, scripting commands, normal mode commands, objects, roughly one line per command. The file has 1600 lines ;-) And those 1599 lines are without descriptions of built-in functions, options, variables and Regular Expressions metacharacters.
If that is not enough for you, start looking at Emacs, or, even better its competitor X-Emacs ;-). Recently there is even Vi mode for Emacs, called Viper.

[radius]

Originally Posted by grumbles

Notepad++ will do multi-line search and replace. Make sure that you check "Extended" in the search mode box. What it will not do is multi-line regex search and replace. I really really really wish there was a Linux version. Yes it does sort of work under Wine but not that well.
It is the only editor that lets me open as many files as I want and does S&R on all open files.
The SciTech editor which uses the same editor "engine" only lets me open ten files at once and doesn't do operations on multiple file. But is available for Linux.

I haven't played around with Notepad++ very much, but how is it possible to do regex search and replace but *not* multi-line search and replace? Aren't the line separators just special characters in the regex?

Also in Scite, you can increase the number of simultaneous files you are allowed to have open by editing the setup configuration file.

[radius]

Hi ghostyjack,

It's a bit hard to recommend an editor for you without more details on what you need to do.

If I understand correctly, your big problem right now is that you find it a bit difficult to do some text manipulation using macros because it's hard to perform perfectly when you record the macro right? And everything else is basically working for you?

If that's true, I would look hard at tools that give you an actual "language" to work with because it sounds like you are running into the limits of what can easily be done using nothing but graphical point'n'shoot alone.

That language could be something like Vim's macro language, or emacs' lisp or VBA for MS Word. jEdit and Scite are editors with a macro languages as well. You could even go for a straight up computer language like Perl or Python.

Actually, before you do that, study up on regular expressions. That way you will be able to use Edit+ more effectively right away. And you might find a way to do what you need using only regexs, or maybe some command line tools like sed.

[DMcCunney]

There are probably a lot of editors that can do what you want. You might want to go here and poke around for references: http://texteditors.org

Under Windows, I tend to use Notepad++, but have an assortment of other things installed as well. Notepad++ is one of a class of editors based on Neil Hodgsons's Scintilla edit control. Scintilla provides syntax highlighting and code folding features for a large number of languages. There are a number of other editors based on Scintilla, and the TextEditors wiki has a family devoted to them. Another that I like is Geany, which is based on Scintilla, but extends the editor through plugins to become a lightweight IDE.

Being able to edit macros implies a macro language in which macros can be written. Some Scintilla based editors use Lua as an embedded scripting language, and you can write custom routines in Lua and call them from the editor.

Other editors may have different macro languages, and some may support more than one.

Vim is "vi Improved", based on the design of the vi editor shipped with Unix systems.

Vi is a rude shock for folks from the PC world, but makes sense once you understand the design. It was written by Bill Joy, co-founder and former VP of R&D at Sun Microsystems, in the days when the usual access to a Unix system was via a dumb terminal, possibly connected by a dial-up phone line. Early terminals didn't always have arrow keys or F-keys, and vi's design doesn't use them. If you have a Ctrl-key and a QWERTY keyboard, you can use vi. (Unix systems generally map arrow keys, and vi will try to use whatever is defined by the termcap entry for the terminal Unix thinks you are using, and arrow keys normally work.) Vi also originated in the days of low bandwidth connections, so the design had a deliberately terse command syntax to let you accomplish the maximum amount of editing with the minimum keyboard input, and the screen handling routines were designed to minimize the amount of screen update needed. Vi has a macro facility (see the :map directive), and I've seen a vi macro that solves the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. The real power of vi came from support of regular expressions, and the fact that you could take a buffer being edited and pipe it through external programs to accomplish things not possible with unaided vi. If you used Unix, you learned to use vi, for the same reason people once used to learn WordStar on the PC: it might not be the editor you preferred, but it was likely to be available on what ever machine you were called upon to work on.

Bram Moolenaar's Vim takes vi's basic design and vastly extends it, adding multiple editing buffers displayed in multiple windows or tabs, a full macro language, and a host of other enhancements. It's free, open source, and cross-platform, cross-platform, available for a number of architectures, and is shipped as vi by a variety of Linux distros.

Emacs was originally written by Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Gnu project. The earliest version was a set of macros in the TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) language available on the Digital Equipment Corporation mini-computer Stallman was working on at the MIT AI lab. (The name Emacs comes from "Editing MACroS") When TECO was going away, Stallman rewrote Emacs in LISP. LISP is intended for string processing, and mapped well to the sort of tasks performed by a text editor.

The current version of Gnu Emacs is essentially an interpreter for a dialect of LISP, and most of the editor is written in the dialect of LISP it implements. If you are fluent in elisp, you can extend emacs as you like, and people have. There are "major modes" for editing code in most programming languages, plus interfaces to compilers and debuggers, plus modes for reading and replying to email, reading Usenet news, working at a command line, and even playing games. Unix old-timers who preferred emacs would run it when they logged on, and do everything from within it. It became the shell from which they accessed the system. Like Vim, Emacs is free, open source, and available for an assortment of platforms.

There are lots of editors based on the emacs design, but using different implementations. Some use a different macro language, and some don't do macros at all. (Generally, these are tiny editors for low end machines.)

Whether vi or emacs was the One True Editor for Unix systems was a Holy War for some old timers.

I'd probably look at one of the Scintilla variants first, then broaden my search from there.
______
Dennis

[ghostyjack]

Thanks for these comments radius & DMcCunney.

Texteditors.org looks interesting, I'll have a read through there.

I'm trying to speed up my efficiency is formatting text and html-based files in preparation to converting them to epub files. Macro's give me a means to automate the more mundane tasks in doing this. The ability to edit the macro allows me to fine-tune or extend them. I though I'd found an easy solution to this with Notetab but unfortunately as it doesn't support UTF properly, a lot of my characters like curly-quotes are lost when I save the files in it.

I like Edit+'s multiple-line S&R as it provides you with a text-box that you can enter the lines in without worrying about what characters are required to simulate the end-of-line. Also its easier to see, say, 3 lines instead of one line with funny extra characters that scrolls of the end of the field.

I could learn to use regex but I still am limited to what I can do at any one time. I suppose I'm a bit lazy and just wanted to have it all recorded in a way that I didn't have to keep running the same commands all the time.

I might need to expand my search to include IDE's and web development tools as they can also provide similar functionality and should also include some form of macro/scripting language.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

Thanks for these comments radius & DMcCunney.

Texteditors.org looks interesting, I'll have a read through there.

It has references for every text editor on every platform I've been able to track down.

I could learn to use regex but I still am limited to what I can do at any one time. I suppose I'm a bit lazy and just wanted to have it all recorded in a way that I didn't have to keep running the same commands all the time.

You might want to look at Perl. Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It was written by Larry Wall for Unix, and versions now exist for pretty much every platform. Perl is designed to manipulate text files, and you can write perl scripts to do a lot of what you seem to need to do. The defacto Windows version is probably ActiveState's. Perl is free and open source. ActiveState makes it's living selling and suopporting commercial implementations, but has a free Community edition with source available that should do everything desired.

Some editors use Perl as a macro language, and at least one is written in it.

I might need to expand my search to include IDE's and web development tools as they can also provide similar functionality and should also include some form of macro/scripting language.

Thinking about it, an IDE might be the way to go. An IDE is simply an integrated Development Environment, including a text editor and interfaces to compilers, debuggers, and the like. Most are configurable, so there's no reason it shouldn't interface to tools to check syntax and build ePub books from source files.
______
Dennis