how long before leaving TP due to lack of upgrades?

[s_reynisson]

PSP?! Come on, you can do better than that, if I had to leave TP, a big if, I'd have a look at emeditor or if I had to work with huge files all the time, ultraedit

Just a short follow-on point; if you need an editor that has lots of up-dates then why not try PSPad

[ben_josephs]

If you need decent regular expressions, forget UltraEdit.

[Denyer]

PSPad unfortunately doesn't support multiline regex, due to the limitations of its editor component. UltraEdit... have they fixed that tab stacking interface yet?

For Linux boxes, I'd suggest giving jEdit a go and spending some time setting it up -- it's not bad under Windows either, if you've got a JVM installed.

Or we could all learn Emacs, but I'm hoping to put that off for some time yet... it'd be much nicer if the authors of the text editors that were big a few years ago came out of development hibernation.

[rsperberg]

PS2: Helios, please bring out a Linux version, please!

I second the notion, or hundredth it or thousandth it, however many TextPad users have suggested a Linux version.

[clluengo]

How about nedit for Linux? (http://www.nedit.org/)
It's also not been updated since 2004, but it's a mature, stable product that works really well. It is not as feature rich as TextPad, but it has all the important bits, works on any XWindows system and is GPL. I've been using it as the editor of choice at work for two years now (ever since I moved to SunOS there - still using TextPad at home on Windows!).
Nedit's syntax highlighting is better than TextPad's as well - it uses regular expressions, allowing proper highlighting of MATLAB source code (when will TextPad do that???)

[rsperberg]

How about nedit for Linux? (http://www.nedit.org/)
It's also not been updated since 2004, but it's a mature, stable product that works really well. It is not as feature rich as TextPad, but it has all the important bits, works on any XWindows system and is GPL. I've been using it as the editor of choice at work for two years now (ever since I moved to SunOS there - still using TextPad at home on Windows!).

i'm not enamored of the idea of using two editors for different platforms, so I will still wish for TextPad to become cross-platform.

But apart from that, I am really grateful for the suggestion of a TextPad-like editor for Linux that I can build syntax files for.

I'm not a programmer, so I don't use all the features, and "important bits" is the part that matters to me.

Any similarity in syntax files? I know it's not kosher to tout competing apps in these forums, but I should think complementary apps would be encouraged until the day TextPad crosses over to Linux too.

[clluengo]

i'm not enamored of the idea of using two editors for different platforms, so I will still wish for TextPad to become cross-platform.

I know, it takes a while to get used to the small differences. But both editors allow all key bindings to be modified.

Any similarity in syntax files? I know it's not kosher to tout competing apps in these forums, but I should think complementary apps would be encouraged until the day TextPad crosses over to Linux too.

Nedit has no syntax files. Highlight patterns are edited through a dialog box, and there is a pretty big online resource with highlight patterns that can be imported. It is all stored in an X-resource called 'nedit.highlightPatterns' that contains all of the patterns for all of the languages. And then there is another resource that links each of these to a color. Note that the patterns are regular expressions, so there is no need for a 'language type' as in TextPad.

I personally like this highliting method better, but TextPad has a lot of great features that are missing everywhere else.