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Recommended Text Editors for Win32?

Posted by Cliff on from the vi-emacs-and-notepad.exe-are-not-valid-choices dept.

Dave asks: "I must us a Windows machine at work where I do web development and system administration. I have been looking for a "decent" editor to use on Windows, but thus far have come up short. GVim doesn't do it for me, on linux it's fine, but on Windows it isn't the most stable thing around. I've also tried Windows versions of MicroEmacs and Vile. What do other Slashdot users develop in when they must use a Windows machine?"

6 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. PFE by 'The+'.$L3mm1ng · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I use PFE, the Programmer's File Editor. It doesn't even have syntax highlighting, but it's light, fast, very configurable and the macro function rocks (Shift + F7, Do some stuff with Ctrl+Cursor or whatever you want, Ctrl + F7, repeat with F7).

    Regrettably it's out of development, though there still is a bug that sometimes occures: when editing, lines disappear and you should not save the file if that happens. But it does not happen very often.

    The Mode feature is not very intuitive, but once you figured out how it works, it allows you to switch things like line-indenting, wrapping, etc. based on the file type you are editing.

    http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/

    I don't use other editors because of the time to get used to them... and because of basic stuff like Ctrl+Cursor, where PFE stopps at far more characters than whitespace only. I need this a lot and most other editors don't do this.

  2. Emacs forever! by vsync64 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I use Emacs on *nix, Mac, and Windows. It works fine everywhere, which means 1 set of keybindings to remember, 1 macro language to learn, and 1 configuration to share between machines.

    One editor to rule them all, one editor to find them...

    --
    TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
  3. jEdit by rjh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    jEdit (available here) is available anywhere there's a reasonably recent Java2 runtime. On Windows with J2SDK1.4, I've noticed that it takes a fair bit of time to load up, but once loaded it's acceptably snappy--it's never going to win points for speed, but it manages to not be noticeably and/or annoyingly slow, which is good.

    It has bindings for something like 50 different languages, from Ada to SQL and every-other-thing in between. I have been exceptionally pleased with jEdit so far, at least on Win32. On UNIX, jEdit is a little slower, to the point where it enters noticeably and annoyingly slow, but it's still a defensible choice.

    If you do a lot of crossplatform work (I do) and want to keep your basic work environment the same in both environments, you can do an awful lot worse than jEdit.

  4. Re:what's wrong with gvim? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You've hit the nail on the head. This post is a nonsensical troll against Windows gVim. I've used it on WindowsXP and it runs flawlessly. I've even used it on the hellspawn of all OS's- WindowsME- and it, once again, ran flawlessly. If you like vim on linux platform there is no reason you shouldn't use gVim on Windows.

  5. Re:screw that *nix crap by SpatchMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe if you think it's that good you should put your money where your mouth is and buy it?

  6. Textpad is worth the 27 $ it costs... by software_non_olet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... it's the best programming editor which ever came under my fingers in 35 years.