Thin Puppy Torture Test II: Day 14
I continue to praise Geany, the GUI text editor in Puppy Linux.
I'm not a programmer, but I use text editors just about every day. Especially for Web work, text editors are must-have tools for writers and editors.
And for me, a text editor needs to do a few things -- and do them well.
Here is my list:
It needs to start up quickly.
It must open ALL files, not just those with .txt suffixes.
It must have word wrap but NOT actually wrap the lines in the text file itself (i.e. wrap for display purposes only).
It must have a search/replace function.
It must have word count.
It must change upper-case to lower-case ... and lower-case to upper-case.
Not an extensive list, but many, many text editors cannot do these simple tasks. Mousepad in Xfce can't (though it is fast), Gedit in GNOME can't. Beaver in Damn Small Linux also doesn't do all of these things.
What I use in Windows: The free EditPad Lite -- a great text editor.
Mac OS X: the default GUI text editor in OS X (I think it's called TextEdit, or something like that) is pathetic. Sorry Mac people. I'd love to have someting better for when I use the Mac, which is often.
Do I use command-line editors? Yes, I do, but it's just much easier to use a GUI editor when I'm working in a GUI. Half of the time, I'm cutting and pasting type from Web pages, e-mails and the like, and it's just too hard to do with console editors. I tend to stick to Nano (Pico in the OS X console) because I just don't use vi enough to keep my skills fresh. And I don't want to get anywhere near Emacs -- I just don't have the desire or the time. Give me Nano, and I'm happy at the console.
Again, I don't program -- I just write, so my requirements for a good text editor are probably very different than the usual crowd at which text editors are named, meaning coders.