Unicode-aware text editor; suggestions?

[Ilya Palagin]

Madison Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I really, really hope this doesn't become an emacs vs. vi thread... I 
> don't want to use something that takes a religious convertion and weeks 
> or study to use. :p
> 
>   I've been very happily using 'nedit' for my so-called coding for some 
> time now, despite lacking a couple functions that would otherwise be 
> "nice to have". The biggest feature I wish was there was a way to 
> collapse blocks (like if/then, while/until, subroutines, etc). That 
> isn't what brings me here though...
> 
>   I've started using unicode (french symbols and Japanese kana/kanji 
> characters) in my program (I'm working on the translation code). I very 
> quickly found that nedit will show anything other than ASCII as garbage. 
> Gedit will display the characters but as often as not I get an error 
> when trying to save files with international characters in it.
> 
>   I am hoping someone here might suggest a replacement text editor. The 
> only key things I need are; line numbering, cursor position, unicode 
> support and code highlighting (html/perl/javascript - preferably 
> customizable). "Nice to have" would be the code block collapsing but 
> I've lived without that until now so no biggy.
> 
>   I have a modest laptop, a P3 1GHz w/ 512MB RAM so nothing to fancy. I 
> like a lot of screen real estate and most of the programs I've seen that 
> are advertised as "programming" programs are very ... full. I like very 
> minimal. I also don't like Gedit's behavior of creating a ~<file> file 
> for each file I edit, even after I save the file... One of the key 
> reasons I used nedit over gedit in fact.
> 
>   Any suggestion will be very much appreciated!
> 
You can still use nedit or whatever programmer's editor you like, if you
don't put any unicode into your code. Read about I15n.  Shortly,
instead of 'print "Hello world"' in Japanese, insert 'print HELLO_WORLD',
and define HELLO_WORLD constant in a file separately from the program 
code.
Those files can be created with any non-programming editor which supports
Unicode.
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