I'm such a hardcore emacs guy that I really can't get too excited by other text editors. SubEthaEdit intrigued me from the get go, mainly as an example of of a really good use of zeroconf. (I'm sorry, I still can't bring myself to say bonjour) I never considered using it to actually edit things on my own, but I saw a couple new features that made me give it a second look.
The first cool thing is block editing. The movie demo should explain it all. You can work on multiple lines simultaneously. It's sort of like keyboard macros that get played as they are recording. That's not really what is happening because you can't use navigation (end of line, forward/backward word, etc...) or per-line cut/paste to deal with text that doesn't have a rigid column structure, but it's still pretty nice. If SubEthaEdit had real macros, I'd definitely be able to use it for more edit tasks. If it had macros that worked in block edit mode, I'd use it all the time.
I saw one other feature that I could see myself using a lot: xhtml copy. You can copy code as xhtml and paste it out with full formatting and colors preserved. Like this:
Even though it doesn't seem to do much for java 5 syntax, it still is very useful.
I'll probably be using this for all the code samples on the blog from here on out.
I'm not jumping to SubEthaEdit just yet. It doesn't have the hardcore editing features that other editors do, but it seems to have a lot of very nice niches that make me want to use it more. I guess it's time to send these guys some money.
Previous Topic
