Important features for editors

[William Ray Wing]

On Jul 4, 2013, at 9:22 AM, Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:

> On 2013-07-04 05:02, Dave Angel wrote:
> [snip an excellent list of things to look for in an editor]
> 
> Also, 
> 
> - the ability to perform changes in bulk, especially across files.
>  Often, this is done with the ability to record/playback macros,
>  though some editors have multiple insertion/edit cursors; others
>  allow for performing a bulk-change command across the entire file
>  or list of files.
> 

To Tim's and Dave's excellent lists let me add one more feature that I find useful:
  the ability to bulk-search through all files in a folder/directory/project for a word
  or phrase, display the hits and then selectively or optionally do a replace on each
  hit in the displayed list.  In effect, this is an interactive extension of the bulk
  search and replace Tim lists above. 


> - folding (the ability to collapse multiple lines of text down to one
>  line).  Especially if there are various ways to do it (manual
>  folding, language-block folding, folding by indentation)

Yes, yes, yes.  It may simply be a reflection of my poor programming style (grow
  by accretion, wait way too long to refactor), but this is a big help in following
  program logic.

> 
> - multiple clipboard buffers/registers
> 
> - multiple bookmarks
> 
> - the ability to interact with external programs (piping a portion of
>  a file through an external utility)
> 

And in particular, the ability to preview a chunk of html in a browser.

> - a good community around it in case you have questions
> 
> - easy navigation to "important" things in your file (where
>  "important" may vary based on file-type, but may include function
>  definitions, paragraph boundaries, matching
>  paren/bracket/brace/tag, etc)
> 
> Other nice-to-haves include
> 
> - split window editing
> - tabbed windows
> - Unicode support (including various encodings)
> - vimgolf.com ;-)
> 
>> Candidates?
>>    emacs  - standard on most OS's, available for Windows from
> 
> And I'll put in a plug for Vim.
> 
> -tkc
> 
> 
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> 
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