From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Apr 30 2006 - 15:30:13 CST
I personnaly hate having to launch a new VM to create a newinstance of a text editor. I very often need to open multiple texts at different timess but in parallel, swapping across windows to perform transfers, even when other large applications are running. Using multiple Java VMs would not be an option, as they take too much resource, unless there's a fast way in the editor to reuse the same VM and run independant editors in separate processes sharing the same VM code base. I also need that each editor lives inits own process, to survive crashes. Finally I need to be able to start and use the editor very fast even when the system is very busy.
Notepad has all these characteristics but just lacks a few features: having regexps (better than those horrible ones used in MS Word, or the "wildcard searches" found in Excel that are extremely defective and non functional at all and dangerous to use for reliable search/replace operations), using the common syntax (as found in sed/vi, plus some syntax to allow matching and replacing newlines, something that sed/vi donot allow) and working in its own internal segmented backbuffer for much faster search/replaces (without constant memory copies for every edit of the whole text like Notepad does, and that explains why search/replaces are so slow for matches at the begining of the document, and run at light speed for matches at end of the document...)
I don't want an editor with many options or that supports rich text. (WordPad has too many options, and its document formatting model is not adequate for working on plain-text documents).
I've tried various editors in the past, and the only one that survives these torture tests is Vim, ported from U*ix/Linux to Windows... But unfortunately, it still does not have correct support for international text (or may be it has now?), and does not allow matching and replacing newlines, treated like normal characters in regexps (it just allows matching the start and final positions on the same line).
So most of the time, I still use Notepad, despite it lacks a few features (and for them I eventually load another editor).
I have already tried jedit, and it is much too slow to start, has too many options, and takes too much resources for a plain-text only editor. I tried SuperPad (which claims to be a replacement for Notepad but fails miserably and break international texts, also its process running in the system area is something I hate, this editor is very unstable and unreliable...) so I have abandoned it.
The editor in Eclipse is quite good, but loading this IDE environment takes lot of time if it is not already running (and starting it may be a non-option when the system is already busy), simply because it also has too many features.
I don't care if the plain-text editor does not have syntax coloring, but this editor must be able to work with lines of nearly arbitrary lengths without forcing newlines... like some plain-text editors do silently (breaking the edited text when its form or syntax is mandatory, or needed for some processes, for example plain-text XML files, HTML documents, program source files, translation resource files... )
Philippe.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandra Bostian" <sbos@loc.gov>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: Unicode fonts
> For text editors, you might want to look at jedit (http://www.jedit.org/ ). I recently downloaded it to play with it a little and it does xml, has a host of plug-ins and seems to do Arabic ok (haven't given it a full testing). It's multi-platform and, best of all, free.
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