Plain Text

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 20, 2006 at 07:25 PM

Daly -

This CRIMP thing must be going around Kansas, too…

> One must for me is being able to have multiple windows of the same or different docs open at the same time for moving stuff back and forth, and I know that EditPad does that, as well as offering tabs, which is also something I want.

AFAIK, they all do multiple windows and tabs. For me the most interesting looks like EmEditor Pro 6, because of its outlining plugin, and its use of plugins in general. Mark’s recommendation of Vim and Vim Outliner is interesting, especially as Vim is often used with LaTeX, but I’ve always been rather put off by stories of its difficulty.

As these editors are mostly used for programing, I’ve found few discussions about their use for general-purpose plain-text editing and manipulating, which was why Chriss’s comments were so helpful. All of the ones mentioned are similarly highly specified though.

None of these editors, as far as I can see, combines plain-text editing with the two-pane topic+note structure the way that NoteTab and the rather expensive DataOmega InSight do. Although this structure only allows a crude form of text manipulation and is not to be confused with that provided by single-pane outliners, it can be very useful for the later stages of writing - e.g., moving drafted chunks of text around easily within an overall organization such as a book or article.

Derek