Featureful commercial text editors?

Question

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.

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.

Answers Starting with the answers here, I searched through the 1200+ editors on TextEditors.org for commercial Windows and Linux editors according to my criteria.

It seems UltraEdit delivers the most features with convenience and polish. My only complaint about it is that some of the menu items are not named or located according to current norms. Since version 13, it has been scriptable in JavaScript. (BTW, v13.20 was the last to run on Win98.) There is now a Linux version, but UEX 1.1 is very buggy and incomplete.

SlickEdit is the 800-pound gorilla of text editors, but really it is more of an IDE. Most of its great bulk is devoted to supporting C++, C#, and Java coding, with a little support for the main scripting languages. It is generally viewed as an alternative to Visual Studio and I found its IDE features pretty neat. Judging it just as a text editor, though, I was aggravated by the absence or awkward implementation of basic functions. SlickEdit's learning curve is as steep as Emacs' and the documentation is inadequate, so the book from Wrox is worth a look.

A few others are in the same league as UltraEdit but had things that made them not as nice for my purposes. Boxer has many features, some unusual, but it also has a lot of rough edges. CRiSP has extra tools for system interaction, but is a bit short on text editing features. EditPad Pro has exceptional support for regexes, but I had issues with stability and feature gaps. Multi-Edit is powerful and extensible, but very un-user-friendly. VEDIT is blazingly fast and powerful, but looks like a Win95 app and lacks features now common on power editors.

Beyond these, there are a lot more, but of what I saw, there wasn't much to differentiate them from the better free editors. As an aside, I discovered that if all you really want is extensibility, it's quite easy now to find an editor that uses your favorite scripting language.

Answer 1

You should take a look at TextPad

I use it as a fast IDE. The customisable syntax hilighting is great. I also really like the macro recording and playback, that has saved me a lot of work.

Answer 2

I don't think you wold find an editor as powerful as emacs, commercially or not.

For windows boxes, however, I have found the open source notepad++ to be good, some colleagues swear by textpad.

Notepad++ has a bunch of plugins, a scripting language, the ability to shell out and more.

Answer 3

Visual SlickEdit is an constant award winner every year, cross platform, remote editing lots of language files, extensible. It even has emacs emulation. For OSX I bought SubEthaEdit for pair programming with remote team members.

Answer 4

Notepad++ is really good for windows, but it has horrible wine support. Scite is the editor that powers Notepad++, and you can scite Nativity on any platform you choose. Scite has a plugin system powered by Lua, so you can customize it to any language you like. You can even install library docs, and it uses a few mb of memory.

For most coding I prefer an IDE like NetBeans and Eclipse and I'm happy as long as it uses less than ~3gb of memory. I'll use Scite or notepad++ for small changes to a config file or script.

Answer 5

I've used UltraEdit for awhile.

• Handles large files very well. I've edited multi-GB files with no problems.
• Pretty powerful search and replace. It supports multiple flavors of regex search as well.
• Column-based editing comes in pretty handy. For example, if you get back comma-delimited data, you can sort the data into columns and chop out the columns you don't want, then squish it all back together. I've used it quite a few times.
• You can group files into projects and switch between them as you context switch.
• It's pretty extensible, but I have only used a handful of these features. For example, you can add items to the menu to execute scripts or open external tools. You can also write (javascript) scripts to automate tasks.

Of course it does a bunch of other stuff that you'd expect like syntax highlighting, code folding, and the like.

I've been using it for years, so I don't know how it stacks up against newer text editors.

Answer 6

Try PilotEdit, www.pilotedit.com

Answer 7

Oded is correct, I have yet to find anything as powerful as emacs and am currently back to using emacs for general text editing (I develop in Visual Studio 2008). For me, I don't have stability issues with it on windows.

If you're looking for a professional environment, you might try primal script ( script http://www.primalscript.com/ ). Some of my colleagues use and love it.

Other editors that I use, which also sometimes have stability problems:

notepad++ (already mentioned)

sublime text www.sublimetext.com/

you might also look at E text editor if you're used to cygnus ( www.e-texteditor.com/ )

For grepping in files within windows, I use powergrep ( www.powergrep.com/ )

If you find the perfect one, please let us know :)

Answer 8

The Zeus is a Windows editor is a shareware editor targeted towards Windows developers and generally the Zeus users do seem to appreciate it. But Zeus does require Windows 2000 or higher to work.

There is also a Zeus Lite version which is free and since it is of an older vintage, it will probably run on your Win98SE box.