Long Time EditPlus user feedback
Submitted by on Monday, 17 July, 2006 - 05:48
As a long time programmer, a high quality text editor is crucial to what I do. I use heaver IDE's (Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans) for a lot of my work, but for various SQL, scripting languages, and file searching, and text file processing, I use a separate dedicated text editor. I've been a long time user of EditPlus and am just now switching over to jEdit.
Overall, I'm very impressed with jEdit. I thought it would be unlikely to beat EditPlus and this did it. However, I'd like to share my thoughts and suggestions.
Pros:
- Cross Platform: Huge advantage. EditPlus is Windows only. jEdit runs on all Java platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris) so I can easily move between platforms.
- Free: I don't mind sending in a donation for a program I use so much, but it's so nice to not need to worry about licensing every copy I install
- Better Plug-in/Scripting/Macro support. By far. Excellent thus far.
- Awesome syntax highlighting for several languages (Java + SQL)
Cons:
- HyperSearch: I like EditPlus's setup much better. I wish the HyperSearch could be displayed in a pane in the main jEdit window rather than in a separate window. I also wish it displayed results as it found them rather than making you wait until the entire search is complete before showing you anything.
- Search/Replace: Regex support is buggy (didn't have time to boil down to simple cast and post, but I saw definite bugs). No multi-line Regex option. How do I replace \n\n with \n (eliminate blank lines)?
- No built-in sort/dedupe. Didn't see a plugin either. Maybe I missed this? This is crucial for a text editor.
- No "column selection". Did I miss this? Very important feature.
- No ability to set "type" of unsaved buffer. Sometimes I typing SQL into a buffer that I don't want to save, but I want syntax highlighting.
- No keyboard shortcut to enable/disable soft word-wrap. I frequently need to turn this on/off. I hate having to navigate the menus to do this.
- Name. I love Java, but this is product really excels as a general purpose text editor rather than a Java specific tool. Couldn't this use a less Java-centric name? Most .NET coworkers would love this tool but be turned off by the name.
Overall, I'm very impressed with jEdit. I thought it would be unlikely to beat EditPlus and this did it. However, I'd like to share my thoughts and suggestions.
Pros:
- Cross Platform: Huge advantage. EditPlus is Windows only. jEdit runs on all Java platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris) so I can easily move between platforms.
- Free: I don't mind sending in a donation for a program I use so much, but it's so nice to not need to worry about licensing every copy I install
- Better Plug-in/Scripting/Macro support. By far. Excellent thus far.
- Awesome syntax highlighting for several languages (Java + SQL)
Cons:
- HyperSearch: I like EditPlus's setup much better. I wish the HyperSearch could be displayed in a pane in the main jEdit window rather than in a separate window. I also wish it displayed results as it found them rather than making you wait until the entire search is complete before showing you anything.
- Search/Replace: Regex support is buggy (didn't have time to boil down to simple cast and post, but I saw definite bugs). No multi-line Regex option. How do I replace \n\n with \n (eliminate blank lines)?
- No built-in sort/dedupe. Didn't see a plugin either. Maybe I missed this? This is crucial for a text editor.
- No "column selection". Did I miss this? Very important feature.
- No ability to set "type" of unsaved buffer. Sometimes I typing SQL into a buffer that I don't want to save, but I want syntax highlighting.
- No keyboard shortcut to enable/disable soft word-wrap. I frequently need to turn this on/off. I hate having to navigate the menus to do this.
- Name. I love Java, but this is product really excels as a general purpose text editor rather than a Java specific tool. Couldn't this use a less Java-centric name? Most .NET coworkers would love this tool but be turned off by the name.