Note: This post is from an old Pelican blog I used to have at simonh.me, which I found on a backup drive on 2025-01-07. It's probably of no use, but reposted for posterity!
Over the years, I've tried lots of text editors. Vim, EMACS, Sublime Text, Jedit, Nano, Notepad++ (and more). As I use Linux at home and Windows at work, I've been looking for a while, for one that I can use on either OS.
As much as I love Linux (and I have no desire to switch back to Windows after about six years), there is some software written for Windows that I think is fantastic. Foobar2000, imgburn (when I used to burn discs), Adobe Photoshop and namexif spring to mind.
So, a few weeks ago I set about (again) finding a text editor that I could use just as well at work as I could at home. I had another go with Notepad++. It seemed to be trying to do a bit too much. The interface has too much going on. I needed something simpler. Plus there were some oddities running on Wine. I somehow stumbled upon Notepad2-mod https://xhmikosr.github.io/notepad2-mod/.
A text editor that wanted to be slightly better than Notepad??? This doesn't sound good, I thought. But when I tried it, it seemed to be just what I was looking for. Syntax highlighting for Python and indentation guides are all I really need at the moment. Plus, it works great on Wine.
It does very little for you, except what you need. I class that as a
feature. I have the utmost respect for editors like Vim, but that it is pretty
much unusable "out of the box", without hunting around on the net for
tips on how to set up your .vimrc seems strange to me.
If you haven't tried it, and are wanting to do some coding, rather than learning the intricacies of a particular text editor, I urge you to give it a go.
