a good programming text editor (not IDE)

[Dave Cook]

On 2006-06-15, John Salerno <johnjsal at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:

> I know there's a request for a good IDE at least once a week on the ng, 
> but hopefully this question is a little different. I'm looking for 
> suggestions for a good cross-platform text editor (which the features 
> for coding, such as syntax highlighting, etc.) but not a full IDE with 
> all the fancy jazz (GUI developer, UML diagrams, etc.).

For something very light, jed has a pretty good python mode that is based on
the emacs python-mode.

I still swear by XEmacs with python-mode, though I do wish for intelligent
code completion sometimes (pycomplete just gives me errors).  The XEmacs
features that keep me from switching to Gnu Emacs are buffer tabs and
hyperlinked error messages.

Most IDEs are rather weak as text editors compared to emacsen.

On the Mac, you might try Aquamacs; though I don't like the default
behavior, a new user would probably have less of a problem with it.

Dave Cook