Basic text editor?

wintertime · 2013-01-27T18:00:20

I'd like to ask if you know some free, good, basic, raw text editor(no ide, I already have one for coding and dont want to switch), as there are thousands to try and often they have features to help you which silently change something in a file. I just need it sometimes to edit some config or data file, so it doesnt need any fancy features. Thank you. requirements: - If I load any file into it and save it, it should be byte for byte identical to the original, if I change 1 thing it should not change anything else, even if there are misplaced spaces, tabs, "wrong" lineendings, fancy characters, illegal character encodings or whatever else inside the file. - It should detect which line endings are used(+show which type and if its mixed up) and if I add some more it should use the same as already there. - It shows something for anything inside the file(no hiding of unknown characters). - There should be no problems to make git call it, so I never again have to see the most obscure editor ever(vim). nice to haves: - It lets me choose to convert all line endings to a choosen type. - It can detect and show different character encodings (latin1,all unicode encodings, windows encoding) and lets me choose to let it interpret it as any other and maybe convert to any other.

Engines and Middleware Programming

Started by wintertime January 24, 2013 12:39 PM

10 comments, last by LorenzoGatti 11 years, 2 months ago

wintertime

4,154

Author

January 25, 2013 04:39 PM

Thanks for the suggestions, I think I'll try Notepad++ and Programmers Notepad first; I already encountered their websites but couldnt see from the feature lists if they would do what I need. Sublime looks neat, but I was just looking for something simple and dont want to spend that money when I would just use 10% of it.

Oh and yes, the problem with the mixed lineendings or missing spaces and cluttered diffs was one reason I asked for this. I disabled automatic line ending conversion in hg and git, because I would actually like having everything more consistent with just LF even on Windows and I dont like running the risk of silent corruption of a binary file.

The other problem is when some files with mostly text and a bit of binary or which would not work with other lineendings or spaces/tabs removed would get screwed up, but at same time it would be inconvenient and weird to use a hexeditor for.

LorenzoGatti

4,648

January 27, 2013 06:00 PM

I should recommend Emacs, but if you want a "simple" text editor Notepad++ is comprehensive and well made, and it performs better.

Be sure to launch the integrated plugin manager and install appropriate plugins; important general purpose ones include

TextFX (low level text manipulations like deleting blank lines, case conversion, escaping, sorting)
XML Tools (includes reformatting XML documents)
Customize Toolbar

You can also easily define syntax highlighting schemes for file types which aren't supported out of the box; consult the help pages.

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

Basic text editor?

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