15.2. The Candidates

Here are some of the editors that meet most of the criteria I laid out earlier. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start.

VI

Of course, this one had to make the list. Many of the advanced features mentioned above started with this editor and the ones it was based upon. VI is still around and going strong. The most popular cross-platform version is called VIM (for “VI Improved”) and exists for all platforms. The only place where it falls a bit short is the readable macro syntax requirement. VI is incredibly hard to learn; it has a virtual cliff-face learning curve. But, once you’ve mastered it, you are the most effective manipulator of text possible. Watching experienced VI editors, people say that the cursor just follows their eyes. Of course, there is low-level warfare between the VI and Emacs crowds, but they are really different things: VI strives to be the ultimate text manipulation tool, and Emacs strives to be an IDE for whatever language you type in. VI wags say that “Emacs is a great operating system with rudimentary text editing support.”

Emacs

This is the other old-school editor that has a devoted (no, fanatical) following. It supports all the features listed above (if you count elisp, Emacs’ macro language, as “readable”). It exists as Emacs, XEmacs (a graphical skin on Emacs for operating systems like Windows), and AquaEmacs (specifically for Mac OS X, it uses the native Mac OS X commands in addition to the traditional Emacs commands). Emacs is sometimes finger-twisting to get stuff done (some wags say that Emacs stands for “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift”) but it packs a huge amount of power. It has “modes” for different languages, allowing sophisticated syntax highlighting, special-purpose tools, and a host of other behaviors. Emacs is in fact the prototype for modern IDEs.

JEdit

I must admit that this one surprised even me. I had used JEdit for several years, then kind of wandered away. But, as I was putting my list together, I reevaluated JEdit and it meets every criteria on the list. It has become a very capable editor, with a host of plug-ins that allow it to utilize lots of third-party tools (like Ant) and support lots of languages. It is built on top of BeanShell, meaning that it is easy to customize and modify, especially for Java developers.

TextMate (and eEditor)

TextMate is an editor for Mac OS X that has won lots of hearts and minds (including stealing some of the famously Emacs-centric users). It is very powerful in unobtrusive ways, supports most of the items on the list above, and plays very nicely with Mac OS X. While it initially failed the cross-platform requirement, it has become so popular on Mac OS X that another company is porting it to Windows (calling it eEditor).