Emacs, Editors and Stuff

I was thinking about a primary programming editor to use to write PortablE code in Windows. There are many out there. SciTE, Vim, Crimson Editor, and Notepad++ to name a few. Notepad++ is a popular editor and has some very nice features. I hate the name though! C’mon use some imagination when you create a good editor like that! It does have a nice way to create syntax highlighting for user defined languages, which I would like to have for PortablE.

There is a programming editor for Amiga OS4 called Annotate. It already has syntax highlighting for the Amiga E language. It has a GPL license. It might be kind of cool if someone ported it to Windows. Check out more about Annotate at it’s homepage.

Being a Lisp lover, Emacs came to mind quickly. But I didn’t want a big install headache. After a bit of research I found EmacsW32. Wow, I am so glad I did! One file has everything you need to run Emacs in Windows. This includes the latest Emacs version, 23.0. I downloaded the “patched” version. It worked fine in Windows XP and Vista. So I am now using Emacs as my editor of choice.
I would eventually like to have syntax highlighting for my PortablE/Amiga E code. To do this in Emacs you need to create a mode for it. I have never done this before, but I was reading about it. You can concentrate on just creating a mode that handles the syntax highlighting and comments. This is exactly what I need. I found a tutorial about it and it didn’t look too bad, but it might be tricky. Maybe I can find the time to tackle it at some point.