Featureful commercial text editors?
- by wrp
I'm willing to buy tools if they add genuine value over a FOSS equivalent. One thing I wouldn't mind having is an editor with the power of Emacs, but made more user-friendly. There seem to be several commercial editors out there, but I can't find much discussion of them online. Maybe it's because the kind of people who use commercial software don't have time to do much blogging. ;-)
If you have used any, what was your evaluation? I'd especially like to hear how you would compare them to Emacs. I'm thinking of editors like VEDIT, Boxer, Crisp, UltraEdit, SlickEdit, etc.
To get things started, I tried EditPad Pro because I needed something on a Win98SE box. I was attracted by its powerful support for regexps, but I didn't use it for long. One annoyance was that find-in-files was only available in a separate product you had to buy. The main problem, though, was stability. It sometimes hung and I lost a few files because it corrupted them while editing. After a couple weeks, I found that I was avoiding using it, so I just uninstalled.
Edit: Ah...I need to remove some ambiguity. With reference to Emacs, "power" often means its potential for customization. This malleability comes from having an architecture in which most of the functionality is written in a scripting language that runs on a compiled core. Emacs (with elisp) is by far the most widely known such system among home users, but there have been other heavily used editors such as Freemacs (MINT), JED (S-Lang), XEDIT (Rexx), ADAM (TPU), and SlickEdit (Slick-C).
In this case, by "power" I'm not referring to extensibility but to realized features. There are three main areas which I think a commercial text editor might be an improvement over Emacs:
Stability The only apps I regularly use on Linux that give me flaky behavior are Emacs, Gedit, and Geany. On Windows, I like the look and features of Notepad++, but I find it extremely unstable, especially if I try to use the plugins. Whatever I happen to be doing, I'm using some text editor practically all day long. If I could switch to an editor that never gave me problems, it would definitely lower my stress level.
Tools When I started using Emacs, I searched the manual cover to cover to gleam ideas for clever, useful things I could do with it. I'd like to see lots of useful features for editing code, based on detailed knowledge of what the system can do and the accumulated feedback of users.
Polish The rule of threes goes that if you develop something for yourself, it's three times harder to make it usable in-house, and three times harder again to make it a viable product for sale. It's understandable, but free software development doesn't seem to benefit from much usability testing.
BTW, texteditors.org is a fantastic resource for researching text editors.
