In search of a good editor

It’s amazing how hard it is to get a good programming editor. I’ve played around with more editors/IDEs than I care to remember: e Notepad++ NoteTab SciTE Crimson Editor Komodo Eclipse Aptana …

There are four features that are critical to me.

• Syntax highlighting. Over time, I’ve found this to increase readability dramatically. Look at this piece of code with and without syntax highlighting:
  
  Doesn’t the structure of the document just jump out with syntax highlighting? Anyway, I’ve gotten used to that.
• Column editing. I want to be able to do this:
  
  Being able to type across rows is incredibly useful. I use it both for programming as well as to complement data-processing on Excel.
• Unicode support. I often work with non-ASCII files, particularly in Tamil. Unicode support comes in handy when debugging pages for my songs site.
• Auto-completion. This is 10 times more productive than having to look up the manual for each function.
  

(Oh, and it’s got to be free too. Except for e Text Editor, all the others qualify.)

The problem is, none of the browsers that I’ve looked at support all of these features.

Wikipedia has a more in-depth comparison of text editors.

Actually, there’s another parameter that’s pretty important: responsiveness. When I type something, I want to see it on the screen. Right that millisecond. With some of the features added by these editors, there’s so much bloat that it often takes up to one second between the keypress and the refresh. That’s just not OK.

I’ve settled on Crimson Editor as my default editor these days, simply because it’s quick and has column editing. (Column editing on e Text Editor is a bit harder to use.) When I am writing Unicode, I switch over to Notepad++. For large programs, I’m leaning towards Komodo right now, largely because Eclipse is bloated and Aptana was slow. (Komodo is slow too. Maybe I’ll switch back.)

There’s many other things on my “would love to have” features, like regular-expression search and replace, line sorting, code folding, brace matching, word wrapping, etc. Most of those, though, are either not too important, or most browsers already have them.

Well, there’s the sad thing. I’ve been hunting for a good text editor for over 10 years now. May someone write a lightweight IDE with column editing.