a good programming text editor (not IDE)

[Istvan Albert]

Scott David Daniels wrote:

> To paraphrase someone else (their identity lost in my mental fog) about
> learning VI:
>      "The two weeks you'll spend hating vi (or vim) as you learn it will
>       be repaid in another month, ad the rest is pure profit."

Time and again I hear this (no shortage of Vim fans, same with Emacs),
and I know I should know better but always believe them yet again.
Invariably I download Vim play with it for an hour, get increasingly
frustrated and give up. Most likely I'm greatly spoiled by using
EditPlus (Windows only), it just makes it so easy to do the basic
programming tasks that I need, everywhere else I turn I see far more
functionality but at the price of not being able to do basic tasks as
efficiently as I need them.

Say I want to be able to execute the python program I'm currently
editing. Nothing simpler in EditPlus,  Tools->Configure Tools->Add Tool
then specify which program you want to run, what parameters it takes
and whether to capture the output or not ... total time it took me
first time I wanted to do this ...  about 3 minutes ... from now on
pressing Ctrl-1 while editing the source will execute the python on the
current source *and* it  displays the output in a lower pane as it runs
*and* it allows me to simultanously edit the file *while* the program
is running. Outstanding.

Yet after searching and reading stuff for more than an hour I was
unable to accomplish the same thing in Vim though I'm already familiar
enough with basic editing and setup  (through my previous trials and
tribulations)  ... I have a few solutions that end up doing something
similar but are quite a few  keypresses longer both to invoke or to get
back to the source that I'm writing, or I lose editing control while
the program is running ... etc...

So if the OP is on windows just head over and get EditPlus (UltraEdit
and TextPad seem to be similar), and just accept the fact that you are
already using an editor that as good as an editor can get ... I know
I'd pay that registration once again for an editor that works the same
way on Linux...

i.