I first use TextPad when I pulled a copy, 2.x I think, from the internet maybe 10 years ago when on a customers site where they wouldn't let me connect my laptop to to their precious network and they had nothing except what came installed with the OS. I was there for 6 weeks and it did everything I required of it without ever having to read the help. That's about the best recommendation I can give any piece of software and I stuck with it.

I've tried many others. Hell, I've got 4 or 5 others I've installed in the last couple of years on this machine, but I know TextPad inside out and it gets the job done.

I came to the conclusion that anything more programmable than it are a double-edge sword. I used TECO for 3 years in college, then EDT for two in my first programming job, and E3(ibm iou that became a non-ibm commercial product) for 6 or so after that and LPEX. Each was very programable and I expended a lot of effort in configuring and tailoring each one to my tastes.

I found two problems with them.

1. It is very easy to become dependant upon your editor and your configuration and become lost and frustrated when it isn't available. Especially when the chips are down and your up against some kind of deadline or crisis.
2. It's very easy to become distracted by perfecting your configuration to solve yet another trifling problem. I can remember more than one occassion when I've expended valuable time trying to get two or more macros or custom commands to work perfectly together to solve some problem that could have been more simply solved by a few manual steps that would have taken considerably less time than it took to automate the (often once in a blue moon) task.

My primary requirements for an editor are

• It shouldn't get in my way or make me think about it rather than the task I am trying to perform with it.
• It shouldn't do anything I didn't explcitely ask it to do.
• It shouldn't leave me high and dry if my portables battery dies, or the plug gets kicked out, or dog forbid, my code crashes the system.
• It shouldn't throw anything away. Undo is the greatest timesaver ever invented.

You'll notice those are all "should nots" rather shoulds or musts. I reject most of the other highly rated editors on one or more of those criteria.

If the editor succeeds in not violating those, the rest is gravey.

That’s the great thing about being proficient with vi. :) Any machine you can sit down at, with any flavour of vi on it, you’re immediately productive on. Not having your perfectly tweaked config is annoying, maybe even a little painful, but it never actually sets you back. 90% of the customisation you depend on usually consists of a half-dozen configuration variables you can easily memorise anyway. (:set ai number ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 et!)

The only criterion of yours it falls short on is not making you think about it – that is, it falls short for the first week or so. I never regretted the time I invested in getting over the initial hump, though.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I understand where your coming from, and I know for many, many people vi is the perfect solution. I just don't like vi!

I don't like is modality. I don't like that there is no visual indication of which mode it is currently in. And I absolutely hate that I cannot configure it to use the CUA keyboard layout. You can get close-ish, but not close enough.

Switching from other applications and command lines which use control-arrow to move the cursor, and control-shift-arrow to select, etc., to an editor (where I spend such a large amount of my keyboard time), that uses alien key sequences to do familiar things, means I not only have to stop and think about what the key sequence is to do what I need to do, but I have to think about where I am first. Add that to trying to remember which damn mode I left it in the last time I switch away from it to another application, and which mode I need to be in for the key sequence I need to work... It is just too frustrating.

I realise that if you are using *nix and a shell set up to use vi-style readline etc., then vi makes sense, but still the modality would put me off completely.

I also like having menus available for me to find the things I rarely use. My editor runs most of the time in full screen mode where the menus, titlebar, toolbar and other consumers of screen real estate are hidden, but on the rare occasions when I need to use some of the editors more esoteric facilities, they are only one keystroke away from being browsable through the menus.

I realise that there are vim and gvim and various other incarnations that probably can do similar things, but that kind of defeats the "available everywhere" benefit.

Everytime I have gone looking for help in vi, I've ended up in some peculiar buffer with pseudo-menus and where every damn one of the few keystrokes I do know, no longer does what they did. I can no longer see the code I was editing, and by the time I work out how to get back to where I was, I've forgotten what it was I was looking for in the first place. On more than one occasion I've resorted to switching to another terminal or screen and killing vi, just to get out of the damn Help screen! (or maybe that was emacs?)

It's really not a case of being too lazy to learn the standard keyboard mappings. It's that I don't want to learn them. They are, IMO, so fundamentally flawed, neither word-wise mnemonic, nor physically mnemonic (as say the old wordstar key sequences were), and they do not relate to anything else I use.

I've said it before, but it makes no sense at all to me to have 104 keys on my keyboard and overlay 30 of them each 3 or 4 times with various modifiers and modes and ignore about half of the rest. When vi was first around, teletypes didn't have cursor pads, and edit pads, and function keys, but that hasn't been the case now for at least 20 years.

I'd never attempt to pursuade anyone away from the environment in which they are comfortable and productive. I have had to use vi or emacs (or pico) a few times, sometimes for extended periods. It is not that I cannot do so, I just don't want to.

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.

I used ConText (0.9x) for some time. Intially, i liked it very much. I ignored the rare file corruption(s). When *somebody else* put the fact bluntly (on editor forum or newsgroup), i had to be sensible about it.

Hopefully ConText project has solved that problem by now (it has been a long time since then) as it was/is otherwise a good editor.