Language-agnostic properly-tabbing code editors fo

Question

I need a Linux text editor to replace Textpad 4.7.3 (a Windows nagware app), but all the alternatives I've tried are either bloated or incomplete. Here are the features I find most important, in descending order:

• Regex search, mark, and replace (across all open files, even), regex search in directory trees
• Tabbed editor with proper keyboard shortcuts ([ctrl]+[tab] should work on the exact same model as [alt]+[tab])
• Auto-indent, indent preservation, and indent manipulation (tab, shift-tab)
• Smart navigation keys: [home] toggles between start of line and start of non-whitespace, [F2] seeks to next bookmark, hitting the up and down arrow keys take you to the column where you last navigated, not where you last typed (I think Textpad's the only place I've seen this)
• Syntax highlighting (bonus: mixed-language highlighting, which TextPad lacked)
• Block select mode
• Run user-defined commands from program (such as compilers), have interactive command results (Textpad would let you define regexes to match filenames and line numbers so you could double-click on an error and be taken to that line in that file.)
• Workspaces (collections of files to be open at the same time)

Here's what I've found distasteful in the editors I've tried:

• Vim and emacs do not take full advantage of my screen, mouse, and keyboard. Also, there's have quite a learning curve -- you have to learn an entirely new way of interacting with the keyboard. (Of course, if they had everything I wanted, I would learn them.)
• Gedit is almost perfect, but it (like most of them) has crappy tabbing, which is intolerable
• Eclipse is a monstrosity, and I won't touch it unless I'm doing Java
• Regex capability is frighteningly rare
• Almost nothing has last-seen tab traversal
• I've not seen anything with last-navigation-column cursor traversal. (Once I started using it I found I couldn't do without.)

I don't have the time or the specific knowledge required to build my "ideal editor", so I'm hoping someone out there with the same taste in editors might have stumbled across a gem.

ETA: Please don't recommend an editor you haven't personally used. I've heard of SciTE, Eclipse, gedit, medit, nedit, GVim, Gemacs, Kate, Geany, Gnotepad, ozeditor, etc. I'm sure that most of them have some of the features I mentioned. If you're not sure if it has an essential feature (e.g. ctrl-tab works just like alt-tab), then you're not really helping, are you?

Answer 1

notepad++ is full featured, I use it for all languages, all the time!

It's on windows but apparently it can be run on linux using WINE http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/nppLinux.php

Answer 2

Have you tried Kate? I'm not sure it complies with all your requirements, but it may. Also, for a more development oriented tool, you could try KDevelop, whose default editor is Kate (but you can change for any other editor implementing the KTextEditor interface)

Answer 3

Komodo Edit by ActiveState has a linux version, and it does most of the things you describe. I've been using it 24/7 for well over a year now, and while I don't like it, I haven't found anything better on Linux. It's the reduced feature free version of their commercial product, and if it worked better I'd be tempted to buy their more-featured Komodo IDE.

It's not real stable, at least on my system. It crashes a lot or freezes, so save often if you try it.

I recently upgraded to version 5 from 4.2, and it was not an improvement. They broke a lot of things so I'm going to go back to 4.2. The main thing they broke which really makes me sad is the tabs for editing multiple files. In 4.2 they had the x to close in the right edge of the tab row, where its position never changed. In 5 it moved to the end of the active tab. Now you can't close multiple files without aiming the mouse for each one.

I used Eclipse before Komodo, and Komodo 4.2 is less bad than Eclipse was a year ago.

Really, this response isn't an endorsement of Komodo Edit. I'm really not happy with it, and I'm hoping you find a good editor with this question so I can switch too.

Answer 4

jEdit might be what you're looking for. Out of the box it has quite a bit of what you're looking for, and all the rest can likely be found in the large collection of plugins available.

Answer 5

I just installed Geany based on Kknd's post and it is SWEET.

I recently jumped from Mac to Linux (Ubuntu), and have been missing BBEdit. After months of bouncing back and forth between gvim and gedit and finding jedit kinda clunky, I believe Geany is the answer for me. Totally intuitive out of the box, lots of goodies when you start digging.

Not sure if it gets an A on the phyzome test, but certainly an A-minus:

Fully configurable syntax/color themes -- I just installed a dark theme created by Barry Van, but you can create your own if you want. Have to admit I'd never thought about mixed-language highlighting as a real possibility, so not sure about that one.

Multifile search, regex.

Directional and historical tab navigation.

Great auto-indent options (different brace modes, tabs vs spaces, you can even edit with tabs and have it autoconvert to spaces on save!)

I honestly don't think about "smart navigation keys" too much (beyond the basics), so can't really speak for that, but it does seem to have a lot of config options for keyboard shortcuts..?

Haven't looked into block-select mode yet, but Kknd says it's in there.

Run/Compile controls, Virtual Terminal Emulator for running commands.

Workspaces... doh! Maybe not. It does have a documents sidebar.. maybe there's a workspaces plugin somewhere?? "Add a couple things" is still way better than "build from scratch" ;)

Answer 6

Have you tried running Textpad in Linux with Wine?