Things I want in a programmer's editor
- Intelligent, highly configurable syntax highlighting. Obviously, the editor needs to distinguish between a Perl script and a Ruby script, and it needs know that only Ruby has symbols, and only Perl has brace-delimited blocks. And it needs to have many tokens to which you can assign a color. SciTE and Kate do both of these things very well.
- Filetree on the side. I don't want to have to use the Open File dialog all the time, unless it stays in a certain directory (but see next point).
- It would be nice if the Open File dialog automatically went to the same directory as the currently selected buffer. If it stays in one place that's nice, but normally if I have a file open I want to open another file in the same directory.
- Ability to perform custom macros on the currently selected text (preferably mini-Perl scripts).
- Regular expression search and replace. Kate does this but it doesn't allow you to use multi-line regexps — so you can't remove a newline character. I'd also like to be able to test out the regexp before doing the replacement — I often have trouble with regexps ;)
- Ability to find/replace across files. jEdit lets you do this, and it's very useful.
- Ability to save sessions. I have a lot of projects I work on, and I want to have the program load those files at once. Kate offers a near-perfect model.
- Simple interface. I don't like to look at things I don't use a whole lot. (Granted, perfecting a UI is near-impossible, but, hey, if the people at Apple can do it, anyone can.)
The best text editor
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