With a grain of salt,

It is worthwhile to note that the things you want in a text editor have probably been thought of before and implemented. To that end, the two most common text editors are:

• Emacs
• Vim

These are mentioned in alphabetical order (so please nobody start a holy war) and both are widely available for many platforms. There are also an extensive collection of macros and modules for both that alter their behavior to pretty much anything you can conceive of being worthwhile.

i mention these not because you shouldn't try writing your own; i encourage you to do so, you would learn a lot along the way. It's still a good idea to look at these and learn from them before planning your own. If you happen to find exactly what you want (which is always possible) than you can save a lot of work :)

In answer to your questions, my favorite features include being able to undo as much as i want, and being able to shell escape in mid-coding run to check man pages or some such. The only thing i can think of that it doesn't provide is Perl regex, but since i don't do seriously mind-boggling searches through files i don't need the extraordinary power of Perl regex (want, now want is another matter :)

jynx