Brad Olson sent in a nice summary of some of the editors he has used, with details on what he likes and dislikes about each editor.
I though his e-mail made for interesting reading, so with his permission I have reproduced the e-mail below:
These are just my perceptions at the time of writing. I'd love to be proven wrong....
I'm picky about editors. I find so many I almost like. I'll tell you about my other almost favorite editors:
UltraEdit
++ Big user base, robust and fast, does virtual line wrapping (i.e. wrap long lines to display, but keep internally as one long line) making it easier to edit Wiki's, etc.
++ ctags, function browser & list
++ Upcoming UltraEdit Studio (now in Release Candidate 1) sports very nice class browser too
++ Winning many converts from last decade's favorites: SlickEdit, MultiEdit, etc.
-- Doesn't do file types right. File types have their own syntax highlighting and folding, but not their own set of tools and macros
-- Folding and function tips don't work well for Python (and other C-Unlike languages)
-- Quirky RE's. Two styles of RE's. And the Perl-style RE's don't always act as expected.
-- Macro language isn't a "real" language: you wouldn't want to do anything complex in it.
-- Keyboard and other configuration files kept in binary format, so you can't print them out. BUT, if you want to modify syntax highlighting, you HAVE TO edit a text file with the following limitations:
somewhat cryptic syntax
non-standard RE syntax for highlighting
you have alphabetize keywords (why not have the program handle that!)
you can only have 20 languages (not that many need more) and you have to manually number them in order. _Ugly!_
EditPadPro
++ Lean and fast
++ Per-Filetype association of tools
++ virtual line wrapping
++ The best RE engine I've every seen (Jan G., the developer, really groks RE's. He sells another tool, RegexBuddy, that debugs RE's in multiple flavors)
+ Works on Linux too
-- No macros
-- No folding (though it's on their list of future features)
-- No project tools (e.g. Build Project)
-- no ctags, function list, class browser
Zeus for Windows
What you've done with Zeus is incredible.
+++ You made file types central to the design with unparalleled support for syntax, macro, and tool info to be associated _by type_.
+++ You take macros seriously by delivering not just one _real_ language, but multiple. What a great idea!
+++ Your key binding possibilities are exhaustive
+++ Truly excellent multi-language support: syntax highlighting, folding, function tips, ctags, the beautiful class browser etc. _just plain works!_
+++ The important configuration files are human readable or exportable and importable to a format that is.
+++ Zeus groks projects
+++ All of this to say, you've factored the design correctly from the start. That's hard to do, but beautiful when you get it right.
+++ All of these things add up to a text editor that I can truly hope to use on whatever language gets thrown at me, and there are many.
-- The documentation is sparse in areas.
- If I want to edit long lines, I tool out to EditPadPro. My work group uses a Wiki that demands paragraphs be one long line. I can live with this, though wish I didn't, but redoing line display code would likely be insanely hard, and I want you to stay sane.
UEStudio has the code folding working quite nicely now and they have upgraded the regex engine to Perl 5.8 compatibility. Visual Studio 2005 is integrated right out of the box if you want it.
EditPadPro has code folding, macros (new ver 6)working as well and the RegexBuddy generates a code snippet automatically in a variety of languages. I use the regex's generated directly into javascript and C#. You are right about their regex engine, you should see what it can do in their grep on steroids program PowerGREP.
If zeus would upgrade to modern regex standards I could do the same with zeus, that is just paste a javascript or C# snippet right into the code.
Good grief, even Vedit, the old editor from the 80's,(and the best HUGE file editor I have ever seen) has seen the light and upgraded their regex engine. You can get a modern regex engine from Microsoft for free in the C# express download. Multi-Edit has upgraded their regex engine. Boxer and EmEdit have full PCRE and .NET capable regex engines respectively. Unix style regex's just don't cut it anymore. If Zeus wants to run with the big dogs it has to keep up with the technology. It is hard for me to remember which strings can be run with which editor so I don't use Zeus. I have an old version of CodeWright that is ten years old and it has the same Unix style regex that Zeus has, but it has a regex builder utility and a built-in grep that is integrated with the regex utility. Zeus looks more modern aestetically but the funtionality is inferior.
The only other editor I have that has a obsolete regex like zeus is The Semware Editor (that one uses braces instead of parens!)but it has compiled macros and has the advantage of being about the fastest editor on the planet, both loading and running so it has it's uses. Zeus is not fast does not load big files and has a regex engine at least ten years old. Zeus is the most frustrating to configure except for The Semware Editor so I won't add it to my arsenal until the regex is upgraded.
To be fair I should add that CodeWright cost almost 300$ which in today's dollars would be about 500$
The only other editor I have that has a obsolete regex like zeus is The Semware Editor
A example of why these obsolete regex engines are not quite as bad as people claim and these modern day regex engines might not be all they claim to be
Fast is good. I like fast. But useful is also good. I got teethed on the Brief RegEx and although I don't know how well it worked, it did two things that I *REALLY* used a lot:
1) "\n" matched the end of a line. I'm working with code and there's a lot of line ends that sometimes I need to find.
2) Brief matched the *least* amount (actually it was configurable) required to make a match. I've come across too many things where matching the most just wasn't what I wanted.
In Brief, I used the RegEx all the time, in Zeus, hardly ever. And any time I do, I usually have to write macros for it because I *still* can't remember how to do a UNIX regex, but the Brief ones "just made sense" to me. I'd *like* to use the UNIX ones more because they seem to be "the norm", but since they are not useful to me, that's just not gonna happen. I just wish the Brief RegEx code was available. I'd use it in *all* my programs! :) I'll have to check out that article (nice find!) and see if there's any way to "make it work".
1) "\n" matched the end of a line. I'm working with code and there's a lot of line ends that sometimes I need to find.
The latest version os Zeus now does support search and replace on \n line ends and it works in both regexp and non-regexp modes
but the Brief ones "just made sense" to me. I'd *like* to use the UNIX ones more because they seem to be "the norm",
As you point out, Brief wrote their own regex engine rather than use the standard Unix one.
For me I prefer to use the Unix one because it is fast, stable and easy to embed and best of all I don't have to spend precious time trying to write and debug my own regex engine
Cheers Jussi
Last edited by jussij on Thu Jan 08, 2009 6:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
fast, stable and easy to embed and best of all I don't have to spend precious time trying to write and debug my own regex engine
Oh, I quite agree. A broken regex would be an absolute nightmare to deal with. I tried to write one without any knowledge of what I was doing. It was a miserable failure. I'm just lamenting that the Brief one is not available for you to just drop in to Zeus. Oh well.
I use the regex's generated directly into javascript and C#.
.....
If zeus would upgrade to modern regex standards I could do the same with zeus, that is just paste a javascript or C# snippet right into the code.
.....
Good grief, even Vedit, the old editor from the 80's,(and the best HUGE file editor I have ever seen) has seen the light and upgraded their regex engine. You can get a modern regex engine from Microsoft for free in the C# express download.
.....
Multi-Edit has upgraded their regex engine. Boxer and EmEdit have full PCRE and .NET capable regex engines respectively.
.....
Unix style regex's just don't cut it anymore.
Just recently I finished a C# data parsing project that made extensive use of regular expressions. The project consisted of some dozen or more regexps, all with multiple sub expressions and one or two around a 100 characters long.
I used the Zeus Find and Replace dialog to create and test the regular expressions and pasted the search string directly into the the C# code using the @ symbol:
