[Padre-dev] Syntax highlighting

[Offer Kaye]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Leandro Hermida wrote:
> For such an
> old text editor that hasn't been really developed further since 2004, how
> did NEdit get it so right?
>

Hi Leandro,
I've been using NEdit as my primary editor for several years and I'm a
*huge* fan of it as well, but to call the default Perl syntax
highlighting in NEdit good is to stretch the definition of the word.
Sure for very simple things it is ok, but once you write a
"here-document" operator, or a match without the leading "m" or a
substitution with non-slack delimiters, e.g. s#RE#text#, NEdit's
highlighter goes to pieces. Or maybe you use non-default highlighting
rules, if so I'd love to try them out :)

It is prettier by far IMHO than Padre's current one(*) but at least
Padre's can get better since it has the option of using PPI (in
Windows, go to Edit->Preferences->Files and Colors and choose one of
the two PPI options instead of the default Scintilla based one). I
don't believe you can fault PPI for accuracy and I'm sure over time
this area will get the love it deserves and developers will use PPI's
strength to provide better syntax highlighting for Padre.
In contrast as you pointed out yourself, NEdit development is pretty
much frozen...

> The highlighter work very fast even with large files

For some definition of large... ever try to open a 300MB Verilog
netlist with Syntax highlighting enabled? Good luck... I only use
"nedit -lm Plain" for large files. In any case it is impossible IMO to
compare Padre to NEdit in terms of speed, since NEdit is C-based while
Padre is written in Perl. So yes I would expect NEdit to have an edge
w/regards to speed...

(*) At least for Padre on Windows. I have no idea what the Linux
situation is as I don't have access to a modern Linux box where Padre
can be installed. Maybe there the syntax-highlighting is better.

Best regards,
-- 
Offer Kaye