Other Editors which I like

[alex]

This is not a comparison, but just notes from me, which other editors I like personaly.

Intype - very lightweight, has a lot of interesting ideas. But slow in extremum conditions (complex highlighting, long lines etc) and also miss a lot of standard functionality.

EmEditor - has perfect Unicode support, support of very large files (they are not loaded into the memory completelly), plugin based. There is nothing negative about it, but I think text editor functionality can be reacher and GUI can be more powerful.

Twistpad - one of others text editors without outstanding features. Noted by people as most Visual Studio like. Small in installation size and memory consumption. But what I really like, is usability level. It works as expected but not as designed All functions are well thought, good designed and in place where you would expect them.

IntelliJ IDEA - one of more powerful Java IDE, has a lot of innovations in code completion and refactoring areas. Text editor is also very good and powerful. But from point of view of generic text editor, is too heavy.

Eclipse - most popular open source Java IDE. Has plugins for a lot of languages, very powerful refactoring and code completion tools, very outstanding GUI. But text editor component itself, is rather primitive, for example, there is still no column mode editing. Also this is big IDE but not a fast generic editor.

Visual Assist - add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, that makes programming in C++ really pleasure. Has a lot of intelligent functions that complete code, and with latest version also refactoring tools, that were missing before in VS.

I think this is not a complete list, but only some that are on top of my mind I would try to update the topic with a time.

[Arthur]

I like MS Visual Studio, second best when it comes to simple short edits would be Notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html and the boring Notepad++, but since I started using HippoEdit I find myself using anything else less and less, thank you Alex, wonderful job!

[ps]

Notepad++ for sure, pretty powerful, huge community but it seems like am looking for a TextMate (Mac) alternative on Windows for ever.

[alex]

Hi ps,

welcome on forum.

Yes, Notepad++ is powerful and has really huge community, but has nothing special that I would like to mention. Scintilla based (as many others); usability not so good; a lot of plug-ins, but a lot of them is not supported any more (for example Function List). BTW here is the topic comparing Notepad++ against of HippoEDIT.

If you really need something TextMate similar (or at least editor which uses TextMate bundles) you can check E-TextEditor or Intype. First has more functionality but heavy, second light weight but very featured and has very long development cycle.

[cichlasoma]

After I had to leave PS Pad because of extreme instability on new hardware, I looked for a replacement desperatly.
Leaving aside more advanced features, some really basic ones which are very important for me don't seem to be important for the most of other users at all and so lot of good editors lack them:

* nice rendering of whitespaces - I like spaces being represented with a dot of a sufficient size of custom color. Unfortunetally Scintilla based editors represent them with a single pixle.

* nice rendering of EOLs - I don't like huge "CRLF"s which break the text visually making it almost unreadable (again a big disadvantage of Scintilla based editors - it's even hardly possible to change the color of the "CRFL" usually...

* wrapping of indented lines in such a way that just the first row of a line (i.e. of a paragraph) is indented (many editors indent all the rows, sometimes even the first one less than the others (so called "hanging indent").

* (not so important but still nice:) triple click selecting the whole line.

* autosave (lacked by many editors as well unfortunetally).

(Of cource, I like various advanced features as well, but that's another matter.)

From the editors I tested,  besides HippoEDIT, I quite like HTML Kit for editting of html and plain texts. RJ TextEd would be great as well weren't it so buggy in the current stage.
If I resign to Scintilla's whitespaces and EOLs, I like Geany. No other editor I tried is able to highlight so many formats by default e.g. and it's highly customizable via config files editing.
From more lightweight/simple editors, I like SuperEdi. It lacks the triple click function, but is pretty good as a "basic" "Notepad replacement" still.
(syn would be awesome, but it lacks any word wrapping which I cannot understand (  http://sourceforge.net/projects/syn/   ,    http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Text-editors/Syn-Text-Editor.shtml ).)

[alex]

Thanks for a good overview.

I think all important for you features are inside of HE, just want to add some comments here.

* nice rendering of whitespaces - I like spaces being represented with a dot of a sufficient size of custom color. Unfortunetally Scintilla based editors represent them with a single pixle.

HE has it, you can select color as for white space at all, as for trailing spaces.

* nice rendering of EOLs - I don't like huge "CRLF"s which break the text visually making it almost unreadable (again a big disadvantage of Scintilla based editors - it's even hardly possible to change the color of the "CRFL" usually...

Basically HE also has such style, but it enabled only if document are in mixed mode (has line breaks in different styles). This is some how controlled in XML settings also

* wrapping of indented lines in such a way that just the first row of a line (i.e. of a paragraph) is indented (many editors indent all the rows, sometimes even the first one less than the others "hanging indent".

I am, personally, also prefer such style. So that is why in 1.50 I introduce indented wrap, and it will be on by default. But it is also configurable in UI.

* (not so important but still nice:) triple click selecting the whole line.

Triple click in HE is a partial case of Expand Selection function. Search forum for it. I think it will be interested for you.

* autosave (lacked by many editors as well unfortunetally).

HE has timer auto save, auto save on focus lost, global/file only auto save and auto recovery function also.

I can not compare HE with HTML Kit (tested it some when), because HE is generic editor and HTML Kit is hyper text oriented. So it will be stringer in this aspect always.

I have tried Geany, UI is not bad, from features I have not seen something special (tools integration were in rather high level, but I am most interested in text editor stuff). With customization, I do not know... If it based on scintilla core, than it is not so easy to customize highligter, because it is hard-coded.
I also like SynEdit, but I thought it build in Delphi, because it is inspired with Borland ideas... The word wrap not inside, probably, because project is not developed from 2004.. But from another side I have seen several other editors based on its core (do not remember names now).

[cichlasoma]

alex: Thank you for your comments. (I know that HippoEDIT does have all the features, that's one of the reasons I like it :-) )

(BTW: I'm sorry, among other not so serious typos and mistakes (I corrected some of the in the original post), I wanted to write "* indentation of wrapped lines in such a way..." instead of "* wrapping of indented lines in such a way..."...)

[cichlasoma]

I also like SynEdit, but I thought it build in Delphi, because it is inspired with Borland ideas... The word wrap not inside, probably, because project is not developed from 2004.. But from another side I have seen several other editors based on its core (do not remember names now).

(If you remember a name of one of the editors, please let me know...)

[alex]

SynEdit web site, seems that there is already version 2.05 from 2007: http://synedit.sourceforge.net/index.php
SynEdit family from Google: http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=edit&id=SynEditEditorFamily
There is a link to it from Scintilla web site, but there is not mentioned that it is a Project using Scintilla: http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaRelated.html

[cichlasoma]

Thank you!
(Yet, "SynEdit" you link is a completely different editor from "syn". The first in under development and just "previews" were released, the second one is not developed since 2004. They seem to have a common core perhaps, but I'm not sure...)

[cichlasoma]

(Yet, "SynEdit" you link is a completely different editor from "syn". The first in under development and just "previews" were released, the second one is not developed since 2004. They seem to have a common core perhaps, but I'm not sure...)

OK, I see it already in the SynEditEditorFamily list - SynEdit you linked is simply one of the editors based on the "SynEdit edit control" - I was confused by the ambiguity of the name "SynEdit", which can mean two different things...

[cichlasoma]

SynEdit family from Google: http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=edit&id=SynEditEditorFamily

BTW, Tinn in it's version 0.0.8.6 ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinn/files/TinnMDI/Tinn%200.0.8.6/Tinn0086.zip/download ) seems to be a great Notepad replacement. It forgets to show whitespaces after restart each time, but it's the only issue I found so far. (Well, it has not the "tripple click selection" either...)
(Version 0.0.7.0 ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinn/files/TinnMDI/Tinn0070.zip/Tinn0070.zip/download ) has no word wrapping yet and 0.0.9.4 ( http://tinn.solarvoid.com/Tinn0094.zip 0094 ) crashes when you write a right bracket without left one, so go for 0086 :-) )

Tinn-R ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinn-r/files/Tinn-R%20setup/2.3.5.2/Tinn-R_2.3.5.2_setup.exe/download ) is much more heavy but seems to be good for TeX editing.

[alex]

When talking about notepad replacement, Notepad2, from my point of view, is  better. But it is also Scintilla based.

[cichlasoma]

When talking about notepad replacement, Notepad2, from my point of view, is  better. But it is also Scintilla based.

(I know Notepad2, but for me, it's Scintilla based EOL marks make it quite inappropriate when I want to get a quick overview of a text.)

[cichlasoma]

EditPad Pro is a very nice editor as well. ( http://www.editpadpro.com/ )
It's a bit less featured than HE probably, but basically, it does everything I personally want an editor to do.
It's Syntax definitions should support regular expressions, but you need a special Syntax editor to edit them which you get only against a user ID after buying the product. (Otherwise, the only limitation of the trial version is that it reminds you at start up that it's only an evaluation version.)
EditPad Lite would be nice as well but it's not able to display whitespaces.