Arve Bersvendsen

Just gimme a good editor, dammit

Ok. My frustrations are now permanent. I’m looking for a good editor. One that serves the dual purpose of both being good at editing stuff with angle brackets, and that is more than half-decent for client-side web programming, plus some occasional Python

Before anyone suggests anything at all, here’s the list of what I don’t want.

• VI, VIM or any related editor: Having to make your own parchment, ink, and quill, and then persuade elves to hide and retrieve your documents from their secret cave in the enchanted forest would be a major improvement to using vi to edit files on any computer system.
• Emacs. I used to use Emacs years ago, and if I have to edit anything in a shell, I use Emacs because I can’t stand VI. Emacs on Linux, even the Emacs 22 snapshots look like a total ass on any system I’ve tried it (Yes, I have tried this, but that particular package refuses to provide anything but some proportional font, no matter what I put in .Xresources). While the menus now use pretty fonts, the actual text you edit looks like shit. Add to it that Emacs is not particularily good at editing HTML. Plus, configuring Emacs is a major pain, and rather than spending a couple of days setting it up properly after having avoided it for anything but editing cron jobs and .htaccess files, I don’t want to redo them all. Nor do I want to spend time writing a decent JavaScript mode. I know one exists, and it’s not decent by any means. (Nor do I have the neccesary lisp-fu to do so).
• Bluefish. I gave up on Bluefish back when it crashed if you pressed “Esc” when a warning dialog was open. I don’t miss it.
• Screem: By default, it uses almost all of my screen estate on icons, is far too “friendly” (no, I didn’t want to close that tag, dammit. Listen to me. Listen to me.), is wizard and click-oriented and lacks elementary text editing functions.
• Anjuta: While venting my editor frustrations on IRC, I installed Anjuta, tried to open an SVG and ran away in horror. I might sound superficial, but when the color sense of the developer of a tool is this hideous, I don’t actually trust that he knows what it means to edit anything at all.
• SciTE: Since switching from Windows, this is what I’ve mostly been using, mostly because it doesn’t attempt any hand-holding. It is however missing a few features, and writing markup can sometimes be a bit painful, because keyboard shortcuts are a bit missing, especially ones special to editing markup. Plus, it’s wrapping functionality borders on braindead. The only options you have is either to have wrap on or off, which means screen edge, not word wrap after some specified column.

But, instead of ranting, I am repeating what I did with Media Players, ask. Are there any non-sucky editors out there? Please don’t suggest Kate, I know a few people are satisfied with it, but KDE is going nowhere near my boxes. Nor is suggesting Eclipse any good, because while the editing facilities are OK, it’s totally overkill, and for editing out-of-project static markup documents it’s certainly not suitable.

So, what do I want? When I still was a Windows user, I mostly used EditPlus, which was well-suited for what I do, but running it under Wine is sadly not an option. An editor should have a featureset similar to EditPlus, UltraEdit and similar editors.