Unicode-aware text editor; suggestions?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 11:31:44PM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
>   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

Well vim should work then.  vimtutor teaches it in a few minutes and off
you go.  Back at university the CS club would do a vi tutorial at the
start of each term and people were usually quite decent at editing
simple text files in vi after a one hour session.

>   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 am pretty sure vim can do line numbering (at least it shows the line
number you are on in the status line if you want, which is all I have
ever wanted.  I don't want to waste display space when I don't have to).
Syntax highlighting is rather good in vim, cursor position is in the
status line, unicode (UTF8) works great in an xterm that supports utf8
or in gvim's own window.  Assuming you pick a unicode enabled font of
course.

>   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!

Well I have been a vim programmer for a number of years, and can't
imagine a better editor for a programmer.  There are many features I
don't know about (probably 99%) but the 1% I know sure works well for my
programing style.

Lennart Sorensen
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