Well Armed

Editra

Editra [21] is a multiplatform editor written in Python using wxWindows (renamed wxWidgets) [22]. The first version was released in 2007, and it is still under development. The current version has not yet reached 1.0, yet it has a great deal of promise and being written in Python greatly improves the cross-platform capability.

Even though Editra (Figure 6) is in development, it has a large number of features you would expect from a more mature editor, including:

• Syntax highlighting for more than 60 languages
• Auto-complete (Python, C, XML)
• Auto-indent
• Column edit mode (sort of rare in editors, but very useful)
• Customizable interface
• Editing of remote files using the FTPEdit plugin
• Integrated Python shell (PyShell plugin)
• Vi key-binding support
• Zoom
• Code folding

Figure 6: Editra 0.7.20 on a Windows 10 laptop (testing the multiplatform capability).

Geany

Geany [23] is an exception to the "no IDE" rule, because it can also be used as a simple editor. It is written with Gtk+ using the Scintilla [24] editor component that is also used in the Windows version of Notepad++.

At the bottom of Figure 7, you can see a feedback area used during compile time. You can minimize this section to give yourself a larger editor window. Geany has many of the features of a classic text editor:

Figure 7: Geany 1.27 on Windows 10.

• Syntax highlighting for 64 languages
• Code folding
• Auto-completion
• Project management
• Multiplatform

Geany is easy to learn, so you can be productive immediately, and if you need an IDE, you can keep using the same tool.

gedit

A couple of years ago, I had a personal editor crisis at about the same time as Joe Landman [25]. We had both used NEdit for many years. However, it was getting a little old, in some cases crashing on certain distributions, so I started looking at editor options, many of which you are reading about in this article. The editor on which I decided for most of my work is gedit  [26].

Gedit is the default text editor for Gnome and is considered part of the Gnome Core Applications [27]. This multiplatform editor is available for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. It has the classic editor features, such as line numbering (absolute necessary in my opinion), bracket matching, text wrapping, syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, and automatic file backup. It performs syntax highlighting with the help of extension files.

I started using gedit on Windows with version 2.30 (Figure 8) and with about the same version on CentOS 6.x.

Figure 8: gedit 2.30 on Windows 10.

The current version 3.20 (Figure 9) of gedit has a new, cleaner interface that works with newer desktop interfaces such as Unity [28].

Figure 9: gedit 3.20 on Windows 10.