Release 1.50 is out

[RJP74]

I am really pleased with the new HippoEdit 1.50 release. I did extensive testing on the beta and have seen dramatic improvements in speed and reliability in recent weeks as the full release was undergoing final testing. I could crash 1.49 and the early 1.5 betas fairly easily - now I cannot crash it no matter what I throw at it. The scripting works really well in the final release. Some speed issues have been addressed and now all scripts run very quickly. All built in functions that are script based also benefit from this speed increase. So the combination of rich functionality, speed and reliability have made HippEdit my editor of choice.

I did extensive testing on the various free and commercial editors to decide which to use and if necessary buy. Like most people the basic notepad editor did not meet my needs. For example, I often need to sort some text but some editors have no sort facility. I like syntax highlighting but some have none, some have limited support and some have great support. Some make it easy to specify the syntax in use whereas in some it is really hard if you don't have the correct file extension. Another feature I find very helpful is the ability to highlight a word and have the highlight remain whilst I edit the document. Most editors don't have this. Code folding is very useful but some editors don't support this and for some the support is not very good. Also, for code it is helpful to have a window where one can see the code structure; very few editors have this and actually get the structure right. Some editors are very keyboard orientated such as the old ed, em, vim and new editors such as Sublime. I wanted a full graphics editor where I do not have to learn yet another set of keyboard shortcuts. I know some people prefer shortcuts as it can increase speed but I would rather have menus. So based on these wishes I make an excel sheet and cross referenced my needs against the following editors: AkelPad, Cathargo Twistpad, Edit Plus, EditPad Pro, Em Edit, Hippo Edit, InType, Jedit, Notepad++, PSPad, RJ TextEd, SCI TE, Sublime, SynWrite and UltraEdit. Of these AkelPad, Notepad++, PSPad, RJ TextEd, SCI TE, SynWrite and Jedit are free. The rest are commercial products ranging from about $20 to $70. It is hard to say what is the best editor as it depends on your needs. If you love shortcuts and hate menus then Sublime may be best for you. The rest have menus as well as shortcuts. If you want a free editor then one of Notepad++, PSPad, RJ TextEd, or  SynWrite may suit you. They are all very good and often better than some commercial editors. In testing, I found that some editors that met my needs were unreliable and crashed, or had functions that did not work well. The most likely function to cause trouble was with regular expressions followed by code structure, folding, and sorting. Some editors required extra modules to be purchased. HippoEdit does not have a Hex editor built in so minus 1 point. However, of the 20 criteria on my list it managed 19 out of the 20, 2 points better than the nearest alternative.  Of the 8 commercial editors I looked at, HippoEdit is one of the least expensive which makes it the best in terms of value for money and the facilities supplied. Disclaimer: I was offered a free licence for my work on the XML script, but that occurred after I had done the above testing and decision making.

As the API documentation was missing on the HippoEdit Wiki I decided to use HippoEdit to automatically edit the idl files and create the wiki pages. This I was able to do without the use of other tools and again proved to me that I had made the right choice in HippoEdit.

So, if you are still using the old release I urge you to try out the new 1.50. And if you are looking for a better editor then seriously consider HippoEdit. It wont do hex editing in this release but it will do most everything else that you would expect in a professional editor.