Which TextEditor is easiest to customize for a new scripting language?

Question

It's been more than an year that i'm developing a new scripting language with its own grammar rules and constructs. I'd like to give the users of this language some minimalistic ide to work with, but i don't want/have time to make one from scratch so i'd like to take one already existing (it has to run on Linux platforms natively, so no windows-only editors plz) and customize it.

Well, which one is the easiest to customize without changing the source code and recompiling it, maybe even with plugin support?

Thank you.

UPDATE

I don't need to know which editor is the best for you, i need to know which one is the easiest to customize AND, most of it, which one has the most complete documentation about new language customization.

Ex: SciTE is good, but its documentation about custom grammars is really poor.

Answer 1

This sounds like a very ambitious project and I wish you luck.

I don't use linux too often, I use a Mac and my favorite text editor is called TextMate because it has snippets, code completion, and a whole mess of other features. The closest thing to it that I've found on linux is called Scribes.

Answer 2

Have you looked into Scintilla/SciTE? I think it gets used often for this sort of thing. It's very lightweight, but from what I understand, is easy to add functionality to. It's not really an IDE, but it's more of a text-editor component that you could use as the basis for a simple IDE. I've used SciTE, which is a sort of demo text editor of Scintilla's capabilities. It's simple, but also quite fast and responsive.

I suppose another option would be to write plugins for existing IDEs such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Both of these IDEs support many languages just through 3rd-party plugins. Going this route means you don't need to build a complete UI, just the components needed to make your language work.

The downside of building plugins for an extendable IDE (such as NetBeans or Eclipse) is that you are at the mercy of the IDE developers. If they change the way the platform works, you must ensure that your plugins still work with the new versions. Sometimes this can become a major problem.

All of these options should work on Linux as well as Windows.

Answer 3

There's always Emacs or Vim (I lean towards Vim, but that's just my opinion :) ). Neither are IDEs per se, but both are very extensible and it shouldn't be too hard to create settings for each that will aid people writing scripts in your language.