[PyKDE] Editor survey

[Greg Fortune]

On Thursday 03 October 2002 07:44 am, you wrote:
> On Thursday 03 October 2002 02:23 am, Phil Thompson wrote:
> > Scintilla already implements code folding, syntax highlighting, call
> > tips, autocompletion etc. The work I still have to do on it is to make
> > those features available in a way that looks familiar to a Qt programmer.
> > It would be really helpful if I had somebody wanting to make heavy use of
> > it and telling me to order in which things should be done. Detlev is
> > doing something similar in order to add Scintilla to eric.
>
> I'm very willing to make heavy use of it.  In fact, from time to time I
> start playing with writing one myself, which was one of the main reasons I
> started using PyQt/PyKDE in the first place.  I'm a long-term NEdit user,
> myself, and really like it, but I'm starting to come up against some
> annoying barriers -- not to mention I want something that integrates better
> into KDE (and doesn't look like shit -- *cough* -- I mean Motif, no offense
> to NEdit).  I am NOT a member of the church of Emacs either.
>
> Personally, I'm looking for something like Kate/KWrite with better (i.e.
> more configurable) syntax highlighting, and of course the ability to
> register python code. :-)  I'll be happy to rate my wants on a list of
> proposed features.  I've not seen Scintilla, but I thought about taking a
> look at it.  It's just that there doesn't seem to be a Debian package for
> it, and I'm too lazy to build it myself. :-)


It's pretty slick and I used it as my primary editor for several weeks but 
ended up going back to Nedit.
Nedit is butt ugly (dunno why that matters, but it still does <grin>) and 
doesn't have code folding but it loads up really really fast.  Even though 
Scintilla only loads slightly slower, it bugged me.  Of course, I'm running a 
PIII 500 so that may have something to do with it, but my editor needs to 
load very fast for it to be usable for me.  I use a konsole instead of 
konqueror for file managment and development for the same reason.  Seems like 
a Qt based Python app will always load signifigantly slower than a C++/Motif 
counterpart.

The only other thing that I disliked about Scintilla was the code folding.  I 
couldn't get it to behave exactly how I wanted and finally gave up on it.  If 
I remember correctly, it was because the sub levels wouldn't remember how 
they were expanded if you collapsed an upper level and then expanded it 
again.  Of course, that's a pretty little nitpick.

All in all, Scintilla is the best alternative to Nedit I've used in the last 
couple years.  Kedit/Kate/etc don't even come close yet.