A question for developers

[Steve Bertrand]

Forgive the verbosity.

Before anything else, I'd appreciate it if my requirements were actually
read before providing any feedback. I know that there are qualified
persons here to legitimately answer my question, so if a flame war does
ensue, I ask that you refrain from responding.

I'm looking for a new editor.

I continue to claim that I am not a programmer, but I'm getting to the
point where my current editor can not do what I need it to do for the
programming I have been doing (90% Perl, a bit of C and the rest is
shell/awk stuff if you want to call that programming).

Currently, I use "ee". The ONLY reason I have outgrown it, is due to the
fact that I can't find an easy way to change my \t to four chars instead
of eight.

My normal work environment consists of a Windows XP workstation in a
dual-monitor setup. I normally use Poderosa (a tabbed SSH client) to
communicate with my work. It is not uncommon for me to have two
instances of the SSH client running, with multiple tabs open in each
one. When I am developing, one monitor displays the file I'm coding in,
and the other displays a screen in which I can run the program.

I know what my options are, and I'm willing to follow a learning curve.
However, I'm looking for valuable input from those who understand what
I'm looking for so I can hone in on specifics:

My desires/don't mind:

- easily set tab width
- fingers near home row
- I'm competent/comfortable with CTRL, SHFT etc
- *very* quick basic movements within a file (preferably a single
keyboard gesture will pg-up/dn, end of line, start of line, top, bot,
erase line, cp line, insert line etc)
- smooth copy/paste with a mouse if I want to transfer from devel box to
my workstation, and back into a different window
- syntax highlighting (opening/closing braces/brackets/parens) would be
really nice, but since my win32 client seems black/white, I think this
is a pipe dream. I can easily live without this. As a matter of fact, I
negate this statement
- simple in-editor search/replace would be a nice-have (especially if it
either understood everything as text, or comprehended Perl-type regexp
- be able to have multiple files open simultaneously for editing, and an
easy way to flip back and forth (a virtual 'tab' system, if you please)

Honestly, the only reason I want to switch is because I want a four char
tab...really. I don't want/need an excessive amount of features, just
something that will just work.

In the last few weeks, I've been leaning toward vim.

If you've read this far, then I very much welcome your feedback.

Thanks,

Steve
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