Cool, I was pleased to discover that Crimson Editor v3.45 beta has been released today. For those not aware, Crimson Editor is a freeware source-code/text editor for Windows.
It may not quite be at the level of (say) TextPad, but TextPad isn’t free either. While I don’t believe that shareware is immorral, I do consider free software to better imbody the hacker ethos. I regard Crimson Editor as the current champ of source-code/text editors for Windows. Some features:
- Multi-level Undo/Redo
- Change-detection. That is, if a file changes on disk “out from under the feet” of the editor, the editor prompts the user whether he/she would like to reload the file.
- Syntax Highlighting: HTML, CSS, C/C++, JavaScript, and so many other languages (even Python and LaTeX).
- Auto-indent
- Matching-parens highlighting. This is extremely handy for multi-level if-statements, for instance.
As far as what’s new in the 3.45 beta, I found this list of features to be included in 3.45 Final on the messageboard, and presumably the items that are listed as “done” are included in the beta.
Alex, have you tried GVIM?
Ah, GVIM, eh? No, I haven’t tried it but I was concerned that it may not support tabs (see also this Crimson Editor screenshot to see what I mean about “tabs”).
no tabs, but multiple windows, etc. are included
i’ve always been against tabs, multiple desktops, etc.
i’d rather have multiple sessions of my editor loaded. :-)
Thanks for Giving me your Text Pad Editor
I live for tabs, no fun keeping 10 editors open at a time. That would be like running .NET instead and let that eat up all my resources ;)
Like your blog although this entry is very old..
Hanne
When I mention that I like Crimson Editor someone always brings up either (g)Vim or Emacs. I’ve tried them both and really made an effort to like them, but to be honest i don’t.
Long live “modern” editors (even though they often could use a couple of features from some of the veteran ones).
I got sick of using notepad so I searched the web and found millions of free text editors and chose 8 which looked good and loaded them all onto my machine and have been using them on and off for a couple of weeks.
Crimson won. I wish it had function collapsing – it might have but I haven’t found it yet.