What modern editors compete with emacs/vi?

Question

Emacs and vi are the traditional editors of the programming gurus. But, have any modern editors been able to displace these two in terms of extensibility and text editing productivity?

I know editors such as Eclipse and commercial editors provide language specific advantages such as intellisense and refactoring, though this is not quite what I'm looking for. My question is more along the lines of an innovative editor paradigm at a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks, etc.

Answer 1

Eclipse, Visual Studio and friends are IDEs. Emacs and Vi are text editors. A text editor makes just one component of an IDE. Editors that come with most modern IDEs provide an Emacs or Vi mode. (Here is an example). The other way round, Emacs and Vi could be easily extended into a full IDE. (For instance, look at JDEE).

Answer 2

I think that the answer to your question would be JEdit, UltraEdit, KomodoEdit, Geany, TextMate, NotePad++, Kate, Gedit. I've used some of them at some point before I finally chose to stay with Emacs for all eternity. All those editors except TextMate and UltraEdit are open source and I personally enjoyed a lot KomodoEdit for web development. It also had an nice extension API based on XUL and JavaScript.

The general advantage of this batch of "modern" editors it that they have better support for modern GUI toolkits and better builtin "intellisense" features. None of them, however, is as customizable or as extendable as Emacs and Vim. You won't be able to do terminal text editing with these editors either.

Answer 3

My question is more along the lines of an innovative editor paradigm at a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks, etc.

The web browser is or will be the ultimate editing tool that can be extended, customized, that is always connected and have all kinds of applications... Pretty much everything can be done through a Web Browser.

As Jeff Atwood said, Firefox is an IDE. With it, and some extensions, you can transform Firefox into the Visual Studio of browsers.

Any web page is an extension of this new kind of "editor". That's why, for example, Google uses it as the main component of an OS (like Chrome OS). The current trend is to do everything on the web.

Answer 4

How about Yi? My impression that its community is currently targeting the Haskell hacker, but is supposed to be like Emacs but based in Haskell rather than Emacs Lisp. Not quite mainstream, but is the kind of editor you're inquiring about I think.

Answer 5

Sublime Text is a relatively new and very good editor for Windows.

www.sublimetext.com

Answer 6

Wikipedia's comparison of text editors.

I've tried UltraEdit, Notepad++, Komodo and a bunch of others and for my money Editplus is the best of the bunch but it's really a matter of personal taste - what annoys you, what features do you enjoy, etc..

Answer 7

a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks

On Windows, the Zeus editor can be configured for almost any language and is also fully scriptable making it easy to extend.

Answer 8

As an example of what you can do with emacs, I just figured out that you can run the git mode magit transparently over ssh and thus interact with a remote repository! Way cool! I have yet to found another editor with that kind of extensibility.

Answer 9

I'm really surprised no on has mentioned these two yet:

• TextMate (Mac)
• E Text Editor (Windows) (it recently gained vim features, but I wouldn't call it innovative).

Actually most functionality of both editors can be replicated in vim, and I'm sure in emacs, too.

Answer 10

I usually stick to emacs, even though (quite obviously for most people) i cant use it to its full potential. Past week i had to work on a pc with notepad++ installed, so i tried it and liked it very much. It feels "comfortable", i think, still it cant beat the raw_power() of the classics.