February 28, 2008 – 5:22 pm
I’ve been a JEdit user for many years now, building everything from html flatfiles to full rails apps in it, I’ve even contributed. I still love it but I think I may have found something better. E editor has most of the functions I loved about JEdit and a whole load more.
One of the things I use all the time on JEdit is the ability to type in multiple places at once by selecting an area while holding down ctrl. It’s an absolute wonder when editing repetetive chunks of texts, tables, etc. E has this feature, but it’s better! If I hold alt I can select rectangular text regions as in jedit and with ctrl I can select non-contiguous regions. If I select a region off the end of the line E doesn’t blindly insert spaces but rather adds the typing region to the end of the line, just as I always wished JEdit would do. I can type in a dozen places at once.
The project viewer is lovely. Like Textmate I just drag in a folder and up it comes. It also saves recent projects so I can go back to them easily, and because it’s integrated with the windows explorer I never need to press f5 when rails creates a new file.
Home and end keys work correctly. A single press of home takes me back to the start of the line after indentation which is where I generally want to be. textmate fails at this which is one of the reasons I never quite got along with it. Double tapping home takes me to the actual start of the line before leading spaces for the rare occasions when I actually wanted to go there.
Switching indentation types is easy, it’s right there on the status bar and accessible with a single click. This may not seem important bu if you’re ever stuck trying to edit someone’s code from a CVS or subversion repository and they’ve used non-standard indentation this can save about a million conflicts.
Speaking of subversion (SVN), the project viewer integrates with windows explorer which means of course that it also integrates perfectly with Tortoise SVN, the absolute best SVN client available for any operating system. You get all the little icons and all the right click magic right there in the project pane.
Panel splitting is supported, it’s not quite as quick as jedit but it’s almost as flexible. You can tear off tabs and drag them to the side or bottom of the screen to split horrizontally or vertically. Like JEdit there’s no limit to the mumber of times you can do this so you can make your workspace as flexible as you like.
Keyboard shortcuts - this goes without saying - are all there.
Best of all it comes with full support for Textmate bundles. The author, Alexander Stigsen is friends with the Textmate team and has made a deal with them to support Textmate features. Code just comes popping out of this thing like there’s no tomorrow. The only small downside is that its not free, but really for around £15 I’m certainly not complaining. Software as great as this deserves to be paid for.
If you’re interested download te 30 day trial from here http://www.e-texteditor.com/
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