editors

What text editor do I use/prefer?

Emacs

By far my favorite. Its installed on nearly all unix systems and my mac. It has nearly everything I require:

  • Unlimited file size
  • Powerful Search and Replace
  • PERL Mode
  • 100% keyboard driven (unless you want to use X11)
  • keyboard macros
  • pretty strong with character sets, including UTF-8
  • available on nearly all Unix based systems

Here are some key commands for the uninitiated:

   
Control-x Control-c close/exit
Control-x Control-s save
Control-s search forward
Control-r search backward
Escape-x replace-string search & replace
Control-x k kill buffer
Escape < go to start of file
Escape > go to end of file

Ultra-Edit 32

For windows, its as close to Emacs as I have found that can use all the windows conversions. I know you can use Emacs on windows, but moving around the filesystem stinks. The things I like about Ultra-Edit:

  • FTP/SFTP built in… keeps me from having to learn VI on systems without Emacs
  • Regular Expressions for search & replace
  • Deduplicate sorting
  • Encoding conversions
  • HTML preview

BBEdit

On my mac I use BBEdit. It is pretty amazing, but it don’t find it as intuitive as Emacs or Ultra-Edit. It is also expensive to keep upgrading it…. which I hate… I don’t mind shelling out a lot once, but after that, keep me on the upgrade path for cheap… Here is what I like:

  • Very good with HTML
  • Emacs keybindings
  • HTML preview on steroids
  • and the best…. tab to 4 spaces option… I love that!