Maximum kudos on your editor!! Really love it's load speed and the way it helps edit various languages. (Having written an editor myself many years ago, I know how much hard work it is but also how gratifying it was to create.)
===>>>What I hope to see added to your editor is a relatively simple feature to increase editing speed, i.e. the actual rate that a programmer can get his or her work done.
So here's a new, but also very old idea: Minimize the mousing. Eliminate it.
We all love our fancy mouses but truth is they slow us down. Keeping the hands on the keyboard is the fastest way to edit code and text. Ok for those of you who have never edited without a mouse consider this: sometimes I just want to move up a line or right a word, etc. One keystroke in an old key stoke based editor would do that, and so much quicker than fidgeting with a mouse.
What has to work about this is a good method of learning and remembering keystroke combination.
The old editors had commands to
move up, down, right, left;
page up, down;
delete word left, right;
Paragraph up, down;
beginning of line, end of line;
begin of file, end of file; etc,
all keeping hands on the keyboard, and all with only the control key.
They centered on the control diamond of ESDX on the keyboard (look at your keyboard). Then A and F for exaggerated left and right. No reason to reinvent the wheel: if you're interested I'm sure I can dig up their keyboard layout. It really worked well.
Also they used control-key and control-key-key sequences which is faster and easier than using shift and alt sequences. I mean my hands have never really worked very well with the WordPerfect model of alt-shift this and control-atl that. I just can't make them work. But ^QE for "quick"-Up (E is at the top of the control diomond) always made sense to me. or ^K for blocK.
2) To implement this you need to be able to have a simple way of installing a list of custom key to function bindings. Best is to do it the way Vedit did it and make a simple macro language for keystrokes.
I would love to talk with you more about this if you are interested.
-- Howard
