I've had some reasonable liking to Notepad++ on the Windows machine at work, though if you've honestly considered getting the Mac, you'll probably be pretty happy with it.

Notepad++ has some of the features you hold in disdain, but they're optional and not on by default.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad++

I've been using the free "lite" version for years, and have never had problems with it. The "pro" version is cheap, and might even do all the things one your wishlist:

http://www.editpadpro.com/programmer.html http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html

Honestly, nothing compared to TextMate. I do mostly Ruby/Rails development, but it is hands down the best editor I've ever used. It looks so simple on the surface, yet you will be amazed at how powerful it is..

There are so many reasons why you'll love it.

Somehow I knew the first two commenters were going to suggest Editpad and Notepad++. Yes, I've tried them, and yes, they fail.

I assume you've looked at these?

Yeah, TextMate would definitely fill the niche you're after. It's pretty damn sweet out of the box, and is incredibly easy to extend. The Subversion support is excellent, and its snippets and macros are beautiful. I've only got two real gripes about TextMate: first, there's no split-window editing support, meaning that you can't be looking at two parts of the same buffer (or two different buffers) within the same window. That feature alone makes me sometimes fall back to Emacs, which has the best implementation of this feature that I've ever seen.

The second gripe is pretty esoteric- there's something going on within TextMate's main editor control such that editing long unwrapped lines- anything past about 150 characters or so- is painfully slow, and gets slower the longer the line gets. Wrapping solves the problem, but it's still annoying.

All in all, though, TextMate is one of the best things about developing on the Mac. It's an almost perfect marriage of all the good stuff that GUIs bring to the editing table along with the shiny capabilities of a shell (or perl, or ruby, or php) script.

dar512: Yeah. Emacs is okay, but it's still too crufty for my tastes. Vim can go jump in a lake.

bedrick: I'm a stickler for wrapping lines at ~80 characters, so I doubt I'd ever run into that problem.

Yeah, the only time I ever really run into it is when I'm looking at or editing log files from certain programs.

Yes, I would agree. Although I do like auto-indenting. Crimson Editor works the best for me.

I just started using Notepad++ and so far, so good. I'm coding in a customized server-side Javascript, if you can believe it, so I don't expect a whole lot of help, but hell, it's free and friendly and easy to use and is probably a lot more powerful than I know yet.

I am still looking for a simple text editor that has VSS integration. Homesite is the closest I have gotten, but I hate all the fluff that comes with it.

You apparently don't have much love for Vim, but have you taken a look at Cream? It's a extensively-tweaked Vim configuration which supports standard keyboard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste, file open/save, etc., and has support for normal mouse-based selection out-of-the-box, along with the usual suite of Vim syntax highlighting, build integration, etc.

I looked at Cream after posting this blog entry. It's actually pretty nice, but it's a bit crufty and uneven. For example, to enable soft tabs (spaces instead of tabs), you have to turn autowrap on and set the wrap width to 9999.

Still, it does an excellent job of making Vim more accessible. I'll keep playing with it, but I'm not sure I'm ready to use it as my primary editor yet.

I've been using UEStudio for a while, sure you have to pay for it, but you really do get what you pay for.

Sadly, UltraEdit fails miserably at #2 above, and doesn't do a very good job of #4.

I edit code off and on, hardly more then for an hour or so at a time and I use TextPad. Might be worth a look. It's also very very cheap.

TextPad also fails #2 and #4. You people aren't listening. :P

Have you tried EditPlus? http://www.editplus.com -- it's what I use.

Dont get scared by the danish language website - the app. is english, and so is the documentation... i have used Webpad when it was around version 1.0? or so and was happy wiith it because of it's "lightweight and out of my face" way of doing it's job...

You can get the trial version here.

Full version cost ~32,27$ for a "personal licence" and ~54,09$ for a comercial one.

Scite has a low RAM footprint, offers language-specific syntax highlighting, is somwwhat as customizable as EMACS, ports to compilers, tabbed buffers, and has interface-control configurations allowing you to kill auto-indent. And it's free.

Scite is very nice, but it still fails requirement #4.

I code on it 7/9 hours a day and I'm still not blind (or mad), think you should give it a try. I've used used it to make regex replacements on 100Mb+ SQL files without a complain.

Coda for Mac is also wonderful.

yes, on the mac, you'll have nice choices, i like subetha edit.

but, on windows, i prefer ultraedit32. fast and cool.

but, in general, i just use vi. :)

How exactly does Notepad++ fail? I personally use it for everything. It satisfies 1, 2, possibly 3 and 4, and 5.

Notepad++ fails to satisfy #2 because the only way to customize the syntax highlighting is to use a GUI preferences dialog to choose each color. It's technically possible to manually edit the stylers.xml file, but you'd still have to change each individual color for every single supported syntax, and the only way to swap between color themes is to overwrite stylers.xml. I was very clear in my description of #2, and Notepad++ fails utterly.

It also fails #4. While it has the ability to display a list of functions, the number of supported languages is slim (JavaScript and Ruby, for example, aren't supported). Furthermore, the only way to jump to a specific function is to click on it in the list; there's no keyboard shortcut. Fail.

Notepad++ also earns a special bonus fail by using Comic Sans MS as the default font for comments. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be drug out into the street and shot.

Not free but the best navigation I've ever seen. Good Unicode support. Try the download at slickedit.com.

Just click on the symbol or function to open a window pane with the source for it.

What’s wrong with Visual Studio? It is free too. Of course, it’s good for the languages it supports. It is not that extensible, or I do not know how!

Check out Arachnophilia; it should meet most of your needs. It is free, works well with the default settings, and you can customize what you want. From arachnoid.com, written in Java, works on any computer.

I started looking for text editors back in 1997 when I started to learn HTML. I liked the syntax highlighting to help discern tags, variables, etc.

Now I am starting to learn some PHP, a little C and a little Java. I have found some IDEs that do a good job all your above points, but no plain text editors. I have found that Crimson Editor does a fair job, but development seems to have stalled. The last release was in 2004.

My next computer purchase will be a Macintosh, so I’m hoping that TextMate will meet not only your requirements, but my needs for a quick text editor that does all the syntax highlighting I will ever need :)

1) Pico for hacking my dhtmlz
2) Notepad for dot batz
3) Eclipse for my JavaBeanz

Generally speaking, text editors are way too fancy and hard to use. That is why I usually just redirect my applications to a file: echo “window.onload = function () { alert(‘best practices’); }” > /var/www/public/javascript.js

But seriously, if you have the patience to learn vi(m), it will grow on you.

Have a look at http://www.contexteditor.org. It´s freeware and open source.