Text Editor

A TextEditor is a program that facilitates the creation of text files. Usually these are intended for further processing, as for example by a BatchWordProcessor or LanguageCompiler?.

To find pages about text editors, see CategoryTextEditor.

See also LanguageAwareEditor.

RonPerrella has started a TextEditorsWiki on this subject.

Singletons?

Has anyone other than me used and loved m.exe (or mep.exe, under OS/2), the editor that shipped with early versions of Microsoft C++? -- AndrewQueisser

I love DanaTextEditor? and UltraEdit. - BrianShort

I liked M (came with the early MS C compilers), then Brief. Now I don't have a favorite editor anymore. --AndrewQueisser

Emacs annoys me sometimes (and sometimes enough to send me into the elisp code) but I haven't found anything else, on any platform, that can hold a candle to it. Perhaps I have led a sheltered life, but more likely because it is a pretty amazing piece of work.

Or, to put it another way: vi is a command, emacs is an environment.

Nah, emacs is the environment :)

And some people love emacs because it is an/the environment, and others hate emacs for the same reason. The facts are less in dispute than is the incredulity on each side that the other side would feel that way. De gustibus non est disputandem.

...Although it seems that, in addition to the matter of taste, also vim (and even vi) are more powerful than emacs fans quite understand. They tend to be unaware of, or to dismiss, the leverage one gets from the shell, e.g. "%!sort | fmt" is something most emacs users firmly believe is impossible in vi. And so they are even more incredulous that people like vi; it seems to them like working in notepad. But no, it's not like that.

RefactorMe : Move the discussion into the bulleted list, create pages for text editors that have had description added. Look into TextEditorsWiki, and consider moving or copying stuff to there. But it's bedtime right now for me, someone else feel free to do it while I slumber, if the mood strikes you.

Brief got bought by Borland then shelved after a few years. The Crisp editor carries the brief legacy today. I believe the company name is Vital. Oh and it is multiplatform. -- RonPerrella

TextEditor QuickQuestions

Looking for an editor that can be tailored (easily) to be used for creating/syntax checking different XmlLanguage variants (e.g. SoapProtocol, ResourceDescriptionFramework). Is there such an animal?

EmacsEditor with nxml-mode and the appropriate RelaxNg compact schema files (*.rnc) installed can do what you ask. You may need to convert existing *.xsd files to *.rnc first, using Trang (say).

See WordProcessor