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The Perfect Editor
By: Greg on 2002-04-30 19:41:28
Section 1 - Java?

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Java gets a lot of bad press. When people hear Java, they think slow and clunky. I belonged to this crowd. This is why I didn't even see the perfect editor until I became desperate.

You see, I've spent quite a while now looking for a text editor that would be flexible enough to meet all my needs, yet easy enough to grasp that I wouldn't need to read a library of manuals and spend weeks memorizing keyboard shortcuts. I found many that were close, but something would always end up annoying me enough to look further. I'll quickly go over some of my candidates before I delve into the treasure I turned up in the end.

XEmacs/emacs

I first started playing with emacs when I "tested" Brian Bilbrey's excellent tutorial for IBM's Developer Works series, which he tells me should be up at IBM's site Real Soon Now. Initially I was impressed by the staggering amount of power emacs allowed me to wield. It seemed at the time that I was going to be an emacs convert. After fiddling around a while I realized that it just wasn't for me.

I don't think it is a failing in Emacs as much as it is my own stubbornness. I have a set way I like to work on a project, and emacs was making it very difficult to continue in my set ways. I like an editor to have a project manager which provides easy access to any of the source files in the project I'm currently editing. I was unable to find a way to do this in emacs. I also like menus. I find that having a complete set of menus with all the application's features and the keyboard shortcut for that feature allow me to learn all the ways an application can help me write code faster.

vim

I tried vim for a few days, but the whole mode thing drove me up a wall. I really don't want to have to remember to switch modes all the time. I would probably get used to it with time, and perhaps find out that I liked it, but as it also lacked a project management interface, I decided to press on.

Bluefish

Bluefish has very limited syntax highlighting, which really wasn't good enough for me. I've found that I can save much time and effort tracking down silly typos when the color coding tells me right off the word is misspelled. Bluefish also feels very unfinished, and I just didn't like the feel of it. See, I told you I ditch editors over little niggles. =)

To Bluefish's credit, it does have some very neat features, like a menu and toolbar that are editable via a set of XML files. Perhaps a few revs down the line Bluefish will be more satisfying.

Quanta Gold (TheKompany.com commercial Quanta)

Quanta Gold looked very good at the start, but it has all sorts of little quirks that really started to annoy me. First off, if you minimize the app and come back to it, sometimes your windows will have moved back to the top as though the app somehow forgot your scroll position. Next, if you have multiple files open using the "tabbed" view of the editor, and choose the save all feature, it actually scrolls through all the files when it saves and stops at the last tab. This means you lose your scroll position and you are likely looking at a totally different file. Ick. Finally, Quanta Gold is pretty unstable. There are at least two ways I've found to crash it doing totally normal operations. And it doesn't even bother to try to save your data, it just disappears.

Quanta+ (GPLed Quanta)

This editor was actually the closest to taking the crown. However, it is missing little features that I really would like to have. I really like when editors give you some kind of feedback as to what bracket you are closing so you can be sure you close all of them. I also like more intelligent indenting and tab support.

Finally I decided to give Jedit a try, even though it was written in Java. Java is slow and clunky right?

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