Hey, all.

I've been a lover to Notepad++ for the last few years, but it has been crashing like nobody's business the last few days.  I'm freaking sick of it.

If any of you are programmers, what do you like to use (minus commandline vim, etc sorry avi )

Here's what I want from a text editor:

-not a full-blown IDE.  I've got Netbeans and Eclipse-- I hate those things... I don't care about live debuggers.  I think a better idea is to not program bugs into your code.

-easy custom highlighting/keywords

-preferrably has code-folding

-supports tabs or something.  Notepad++ has this great view option where you can split the window into two parts with a hotkey, and then have tabs be on one side or the other.  That way I can have two documents open at the touch of a key, or just one big view if I want to disasble it

-modern.  I'm running Windows 7 here.  I can't be held down with WinXP trash 

I don't know what else... I'm just so tired of Notepad++ spazzing out all the time.  If it weren't so bloody unstable, my life would be almost perfect :P

I've tried the following, and I didn't find them to my liking or up-to-par:
Editpad [pro], Notepad2, Propad, notepad, Eclipse, Netbeans

Thanks for any ideas, guys.

Vim.

Takes 3 hours to become mediocre at text-editing, 5 hours till you start writing your own vimrc's, and 10 hours until someone looking over your shoulder thinks you are a magician.  You'll probably never take your hands off the keyboard after a few weeks.

Of course, I have to also recommend you try Emacs (at least eventually).  I dislike it, but I gave it a month.  I just happened to think in terms of Vim a little better.  Honestly, the idea that I just SSH into a server, type vim filename.txt and have -the exact environment- as my desktop is disgustingly awesome to me.

If you decide to make the jump, let me know and I'll point you to some great learning resources.  I'll also shoot you a copy of my vimrc, which has a bunch of cool hacks to make life easier.

Heh.. I use vim when I'm in an SSH session, but I think my most enormous roadblock with vim is not using the Shift key as naturally as in a windows editor.  Honestly, I could smack the crap out of anybody else in our office: they use vim, I use Notepad++.  I'm a fast typer, I have a compact keyboard with the home/end keys reachable by my right hand without leaving the home position... All I need in an editor is "enhanced" home key for going only to the start of a line's first non-whitespace character, and a shift key modifier for highlighting.

The vimrc is wickedly annoying to put together (though I would appreciate you sending me yours)... it's like a lifelong pursuit toward mediocre contentment.

I've read the tutorials on vim, and I've tried using it for a while.  I realize there's a learning curve to remember the various key actions, but I am in love with having the shift-highlighting combined with holding Ctrl for jumping words at a time.  Copy/pasting in vim seems clunky to me, especially in its block-mode, and not nearly as precise when I need to copy the last half of a line, the next line, and then the first few words of a final line.  In a windows-esque editor, this simply is accomplished with shift + (down, ctrl + right)  In vim?  I have yet to discover.  It's desire to have you hit [number]w and the like... that's annoying to me.  I don't know how many words I want to move!  And I don't like having to take the time to count, simply to move the cursor.  I'm visual, and prefer that I see the highlighting engulf each word as I hit shift + ctl + left/right.


I don't know... I use vim for stuff here and there, but I just don't feel like I could use it to program.  All things Unix work off of a philosophy that requires you to already know about a feature in order to use it.  It's a catch-22 that plagues the operating system and its programs.  GUI-editors, however, present to you your options, so that you can learn about new things without being already omniscient...

I think the biggest thing for any programmer is to not have your hands leave the keyboard, like you've said.  ... but I already don't do that.  I only navigate with the keyboard, while I'm in a text field.  I watch some of the other guys at my work office use the mouse to move around, and it's painfully slow for me to watch them do that :P

So the reason Vim doesn't rely on shift to move around is because you never have to leave the home row if you are competent at Vim.

When I'm selecting text, I do exactly what you're wanting, a word-by-word movement.  Except for me, that is granular to the point where I can, in 3 keypresses, select a specific code block matched within, say, curly braces.  To highlight stuff the Vim way, you press "v" (visual mode), and then (very simply) the "block" modifier.  That could be word ("w"), paragraph ("]") or whatever.

I have a couple of friends who wanted the shift thing to happen, and that's easy enough to script in your vimrc.  I actually think I have that commented out somewhere in my vimrc from when I started using it.  If that's the only thing that's holding you back, the script is pretty straightforward (a few lines).

At the end of the day, you're best at what you're experienced with.  I used to be a Notepad++ guy on Windows, because it was the best of what was available at the time.  I discovered Vim 18 months or so ago after an earlier failed attempt, and I was good to go.  Obviously, the mindset doesn't apply to everyone--you can't expect it to!--but, at least in my case, my first failure to grep the intricacies of Vim was bad learning.  The way I taught myself this time around was to manipulate text at 50% speed so that I thought carefully about what the most efficient way of doing things was.  A week or so later, and you're laughing all the way to your command line.

I urge you to try Emacs: it's a night and day difference in mindset to Vim, and a little more familiar as compared to a standard editor.  It's not ubiquitously installed--at least, as much so as Vim--but...it's Emacs...you can get it wherever you want.

I'm sure it's possible (since most things are, if you just have the right stuff in the vimrc), but what of languages that rely on indentation, such as Python, or even HTML, where indentation suggests the code blocks?

I think that much of my navigation trouble in vim comes from the fact that (in general) I think of every line as a line, and the indentation is unimportant.  Much of my copy-paste stuff has nothing to do with code blocks or words, its always lines and partial lines.  When it comes to vim, the best way to use it seems to be to be intimately familiar with how many lines everything is, or where some code block ends, or the like.

Full IDEs seems to think that you're stupid and need to be reminded of everything, and Vim seems to want you to know everything about everything in order to be fast at it.  .. and I fall somewhere in between