FINDING NIRVANA, EDITOR I'm sort-of unenthusiastic about providing software remomendations here, it seems pretty pointless, though I don't know why it would be more pointless than anything else I post. Maybe it's just that I rarely value other people's recommendations very highly myself - they usually turn out to have different priorities to me. Text editors are an extreme case because there are an incredible number of them, to the point where it's completely impractical to try them all. If you're in any doubt of this statement then just take a look at http://TextEditors.org . As such I've only recently stumbled upon one which actually seems a good fit for me all round. I should point out that I'm really talking here about source code editors. For writing this sort of thing, or posts for Email or Usenet, or editing configuration files, I'm happy with just about anything. For these posts I do prefer a graphical editor so that I can use use soft line wrapping without copy/paste selections using the mouse cursor getting awkward. For Email and Usenet I usually compose with hard wrapping because it works better for me when writing shorter things, and there I'll confess that I often use Nano. For code editing I flirted with terminal-based editors, Nano again as well as Vi-derivatives, but I soon decided that a good graphical editor is simply better for code editing. Again using the mouse for text selection is the big plus point, because copying and pasting things saves a lot of the typos and mis-remembered (even after I only looked at them a second ago!) variable/function names that plague me when writing anything complicated. I know there are lots of clever ways to do selections in Vi-based editors, but they just don't seem as easy. Beyond that, I'm in love with tabs, and being able to control the text size separately from the terminal, as well as more flexible window resizing, are minor but worthy advantages. They may come from the fact that I still always use single 14-16in 4:3 screens that are never at a resolution higher than 1024x768 (yes, some websites are a pain with that these days). One thing that I do like about those editors, and one reason why I never tried Emacs, is that they're small and fast. I won't go into full reviews of different graphical editors that I've tried, but in general slow start-up time and laggyness (on hardware from ~2001, to be fair, but a text editor should need nothing more) tended to accompany a sufficiently complete set of features, especially among editors that are still being packaged for major distros today (I don't mind compiling software myself, but for my default editor I ideally don't want to have to do it for every different system that I want to use it on). Anyway the one I've finally discovered this year, albeit rather late being the year of its 30th anniversary, is NEdit, "the Nirvana Editor". It's not quite as quick to start up as all the alternatives, but quite acceptable, and it offers an excellent set of features including everything I've liked in other editors as well as some surprises such as block-selections for copy/paste and "tips" files for short function descriptions (handy for PHP in particular) in pop-ups. The syntax highlighting is completely customisable, as are the text colours (though my ideal colouring for C and Bash source code didn't apply so well to PHP and HTML, so I'll have to do some more tweaking there). Keyboard shortcuts are Control-key based, which is definitely my preference because I'm certainly not a Vi convert. It has a split-view for showing different parts of the same document. Generally all that I'm looking for. There's also a client-server system so that you can open files in an existing NEdit process (as a new tab) from outside of the editor. It uses the Motif (or LesTiff) toolkit, which is probably why it's not as laggy as other graphical editors based on more bloated toolkits such as later GTK versions or Qt. For people who can't stand decent performance, there is a Qt-based fork: https://github.com/eteran/nedit-ng/ Apparantly NEdit also can't deal with UTF-8 text, which as a pure ASCII speaker makes no difference to me, but there's this fork that tries to add that as well as anti-aliased text rendering (I actively dislike the latter in this context though): https://sourceforge.net/projects/xnedit/ Actually you can tell that NEdit is software that I like because most of the things other people see as wrong with it these days are things that I see as good features. Now you might understand why recommending things to others feels pointless for me most of the time. Also in keeping with lots of the software that I've come to like, especially graphical programs, it's now pretty much in the process of falling off the web. The remaining resource is the SourceForge page here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/ The website was here, but seems to have turned into someone's unrelated blog even before the latest release in 2017: http://www.nedit.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150103074650/http://www.nedit.org/ Then there was also a dedicated Wiki here: http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/Main_Page http://web.archive.org/web/20101210151306/http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/Main_Page Syntax highlighting for additional languages (PHP was the one I was looking for which isn't in the release package) and tips files were on the also-dead Nedit FTP server, but are mirrored here (which took me quite a while to find): http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/editors/NEdit/contrib/ Perhaps I'm just grumpy with the direction of GUI software in general so I only like things that nobody works on anymore. But so what? It's fast, fully-featured, and stable (the latter is another important point not shared by all of the alternatives that I've tried). That's all I'm looking for, and if it took decades to get to that point then I'm just glad that I didn't become one of the thousands of programmers who've chosen instead to try writing their own ideal editor from scratch (something FLTK-based did cross my mind, the FLTK tutorial even describes building a text editor, and I like fldiff a lot). - The Free Thinker.