What unicode-friendly text editor would you recommend for Windows?

Question

I work on a lot of Asian Language localization projects, and am looking for a powerful text editor with the following features:

1) Unicode support 2) Find in Files 3) Replace in Files 4) Regular expressions 5) Multiline find/replace 6) Built-in diff

I am currently using NotePad++, but it doesn't really support unicode in its find-in-files tool, which is a deal-breaker. EmEditor looks promising, but it doesn't have multi-line find/replace.

Anyone working with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean files have a text editor that they like, free or commercial?

Answer 1

Ultraedit is my favorite text editor and it is advertised as having good Unicode support

http://www.ultraedit.com/support/tutorials_power_tips/ultraedit/unicode.html.

It has the find / replace / regex features you're looking for as well as almost every other feature I have ever needed.

Answer 2

Check out JEdit. It's written in Java, which has language-level Unicode support. I haven't confirmed that it has all those features you listed, but I'd be surprised if it did not.

Answer 3

Here's a page that describes using Vim with Chinese language files: http://blog.wensheng.com/2007/05/vim-gvim-utf8-and-chinese-in-windows-xp.html

Disclaimer: I don't actually work with Asian languages, but Vim is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a featureful and internationalized editor.

Answer 4

SciTE

http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTETranslation.html

~ ~ ~

Relevant new features (unicode) of Scintilla's (the library which the SciTE editor is built upon) recent release notes:

• Released on 18 October 2008.
  • Scintilla on Windows can interpret keys as Unicode even when a narrow character window with SCI_SETKEYSUNICODE.
  • Notification sent when autocompletion cancelled.
  • Assembler lexer works with non-ASCII text.
  • CSS lexer updated and works with non-ASCII.

Answer 5

I'd recommend EditPadPro (http://www.editpadpro.com). Aside from full Unicode support, it has one of the best regex engines built-in (it's from JGSoft, the makers of RegexBuddy (which incidentally integrates perfectly into EditPadPro)). You'll need RegexBuddy for the Find/Replace in files feature, everything else from your list is covered by EditPadPro itself.

I've switched from UltraEdit to EditPadPro a few months ago precisely because of its superior regex engine (UltraEdit's Perl regex engine has a few annoying bugs especially concerning multi-line find/replace operations).

A portable version that installs on any USB stick is included for free.

Jan Goyvaerts, EPP's creator, is a Belgian living in Thailand, so you can be pretty sure he knows his way around Asian languages.

Answer 6

I use UniRed for Unicode-intensive stuff. (I don't use it as a general purpose editor though: jEdit). UniRed displays the hex value for the current glyph in the lower screen, which is really handy (even for ASCII).

Answer 7

EmEditor now supports multiline find/replace, and has full support for Unicode/Asian languages. I use it as my default on Windows and it works great.