Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode

emav has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear brothers,

I'm looking for a nice freeware editor that supports perl-based regex's, perl command highlighting, unicode and the ability to correctly display different unicode representations such as those of the &#DDDD; format.

I have been using UniRed for the past couple of years. It's got all of the above but it is not supported any more and its perl-based regex's seem to be buggy (at least, I often get "out-of-range" messages).

So, has anybody out there found (or written) such an editor?

Retitled by davido from 'Editor+regex's+highlighting+unicode+&#DDDD; support'.

Comment on Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode

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Re: Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode by fmerges (Chaplain) on Jun 29, 2005 at 13:13 UTC
Hi, Take a look at Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) and EPIC (http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/). I tried it some months ago and looks good, and if you program with Java, you can have it all in one. There is also Komodo(?) from Activestate, but don't know if it cost money also for personal use... I preffer to use Vim... Regards, \|fire\|	[reply]
Re: Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode by jhourcle (Prior) on Jun 29, 2005 at 12:13 UTC
I don't know about '&#DDDD;' format (as that's really a function of HTML), but TextWrangler does the rest of what you're asking for. Unfortunately, it's Mac-only. (lucky for me, you never specified a platform)	[reply]
Re^2: Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Jun 29, 2005 at 14:31 UTC
I was surprised at how much vi on linux supported perl development. Its regex's are not exactly the same, but come from the same sort of background. It was able to recognise perl language elements and give them a distinguishing colour - for example, you can quickly see if you didn't close quotes by the trail of pink that starts from the open quote and continues until wherever the next quote is found in the file! Another plus-point was that it could also recognise SQL, ksh, C etc., so that the one editor, albeit rather old-fashioned for many people, does at least serve all devt. and admin. editing purposes. One world, one people	[reply]
Re^2: Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode by emav (Pilgrim) on Jun 29, 2005 at 12:39 UTC
Oops! Well, actually, I use both linux and WinXP. So, I thought that any answer would be welcome but, of course, I forgot about the Mac. Anyway, thanks for pointing TextWrangler to me. It really seems to be a great programme. I'll keep an eye for a port in the future.	[reply]
Re: Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode by Kevad (Scribe) on Jun 30, 2005 at 14:41 UTC
Check out jEdit. The nice thing is that it works on just about every platform, so you don't have to learn different editors when you move machines.	[reply]