Zeus IDE

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:
  1. somewhat cryptic syntax
  2. non-standard RE syntax for highlighting
  3. you have alphabetize keywords (why not have the program handle that!)
  4. 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.

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.

The only other editor I have that has a obsolete regex like zeus is The Semware Editor

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.

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",

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

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.

    // create the regexp
    Regexp regexp = new Regexp(@"(^[ ]+Example[ ]+: )([A-Za-z]+)( [ A-Za-z&-]+)");