But no, I prefer to share my passion for jEdit, my choice for an all purpose versatile open source editor. Funnily, when discussion comes to editors, geeks just go berserk and try to prove how superior is their favorite tool. I will try to avoid this kind of flame war and will just share what I like most about jEdit:
- It is easily extensible to support new features via an integrated plugin manager. Each plugin could contribute new views that you can dock anywhere and create your own environment. I personally use the XML support plugins a lot and dock them all around the editor window for a great work environment.
- Adding syntactic coloring for new languages is just a bliss. For example, I created what is called a mode to simplify the edition of WAC files in just a few minutes.
- The integrated HyperSearch facility just finds things on your hard drive without referring to any particular animal or having to index the terabytes of source code you write on weekends just for fun.
- It is cross platform, which means I can use it when I work on Linux or Mac. How can this matter to a Windows developer? Well, sooner or later, you will be exposed to an OS that is not a member of the Microsoft galaxy so how cool will it be to just use the same tool everywhere?
- It can open files not created on Windows systems without stumbling on different flavors of Newline and showing everything on one line. Again, this might seem like unnecessary for an hard core Windows-only-and-the-rest-of-the-universe-can-die developer, but again it happens more often than expected when you start to share files with people in the rest-of-the-universe!
