I really don’t have a strong opinion on the text-editor war (I mean Emacs vs Vi[m]). This is due to the fact that I use neither of them. I know that you can be incredibly efficient with them once you learn how to use them. But I just don’t feel comfortable to switch at the moment.
This is mainly due to the fact that I once took the task upon me to use Regular Expressions to reformat an ancient 6,5MB table in .txt format to something that I could import into a MySQL Database.
Well this sounds simple enough, although finding a text editor with decent RegExp support is not. I really searched high and low to find a simple text editor that can deal with multiple-line matches and capturing groups. What I finally found was Notepad RE whose whole reason for existence is using a complete implementation of the Perl Regular Expression standard. It’s a neat little program but lacks some of the other features I needed.
Then I finally stumbled upon MadEdit. It is ancient, not maintained and has a very Windows 98 looking Interface. But nonetheless it’s the best simple to use text editor I have found to date. Why you ask? Well:
- Syntax Highlighting for most programing and markup languages
- very good support for regular expressions
- search/replace using regular expressions on multiple files or even folders
- multi platform
- a seamless transition from text-mode to column-mode to Hex-Editor mode
- Hex search and replace
- support for ancient encodings like CP 437
- a pretty strange Icon
Seriously this icon seems to make people curious as to what it is all about. Really there are multiple people who have asked me about the Icon as they saw it in my task-bar or on my desktop.
I am probably going to transition to Vi(m) sooner or later but until then I am going to love every Minute of using MadEdit.
originally posted: 22.06.10 05:39
Edit (20.01.2013): I’ve recently found Sublime Text 2 to be offering some features that I’m missing in MadEdit but I’ll still keep it around for the occasional batch Regex or hex editing job.