wolfsREIGN

I'm addicted to E!

The program, not the drug, or the channel. My friend Dave introduced me to it today, and I have to admit that in less than a day it has already become my favorite windows-based text editor. Clearly I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Textmate, but E comes in a close second for favorite text editor. The shear fact that it integrates TM’s bundles and Cygwin’s Linux functionality into a windows based editor is enough for me to love it.

I do have a couple of complaints though.

1. I dislike the fact that the preview window is Trident based, rather than Gecko or WebKit¹.
2. I wish it had support for TM’s macros, so that I could record some actions that I commonly use in TM.
3. The lack of auto-pairing. I love that TM autmatically pairs my quotes, and brackets, and I just wish E had the same capability.
4. The lack of Folding. I love being able to fold code in TM so that I can concentrate only on the code that I am working on, rather than all the code of the entire document.
5. The lack of smart-indentation. I can’t copy and paste text in E and have it smartly indented to match what the program assumes would be the right levels.

Other than those few problems, I think the editor is a great program, even if it was an after-thought to the RCM that is embeded into it.

¹ Thanks to Swift we know that it is possible to run a browser based on WebKit in Windows, it’s just in the process of being developed.