cross-platform source code editor

[John Stoneham <captnjameskirk@moc.oohay>]

I've been searching for a good Ada source code editor and think I have 
finally found one I can stick with. I like it so much I felt I had to share 
my enthusiasm here.

First of all, emacs (and xemacs too) is out. I'm sorry, it just is. I've 
been a Linux user for about 4 years now and Linux is the only thing I use 
on my laptop. I have tried emacs off and on for all of those 4 years, but 
it is not going to happen. I don't want to start a flame war about it. I'm 
sure many people find it indespensible, but I don't.

Vim is better (IMVHO) than emacs, but it still doesn't have the ease of use 
which makes writing code fun. If I'm stuck in a console, give me vim any 
day, but the fact is that even under Linux most users are in a graphical 
desktop environment.

Adagide is fine for quick-and-dirty things, but not for a large project. 
It's also only available for Windows, which means I won't be using it much.

I have also tried Nedit, Cooledit, and Glimmer. Most of my development is 
done on Linux (I just compile for Windows as needed) so it didn't bother me 
that these were Linux-only programs. Glimmer would be my choice but I 
couldn't get it to properly jump to code when clicking on error output from 
my ada programs. This may have been fixed by now or it may just be an 
incompatibility with the format gnatmake uses to report errors, I don't 
know. So I kept looking, and then I found SciTE.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

I must tell everyone to try out this editor! It's avaiable for Windows, 
Linux, and Solaris. It has many features and is highly customizable, but it 
is small, fast, and efficient. It's not a "visual studio" but it does allow 
for compiling and running programs from within the editor. It has 
auto-tabs, word completion, and of course syntax highlighting for Ada. The 
tools commands (compile, make, execute) for ada worked right out-of-the-box 
for me. I needed to add a tool command to run GVD, but this was easy to do.

Sorry if this sounds like I'm plugging SciTE, I just wish someone had 
pointed it out to me a long time ago (which is what I hope to do for others 
now).

-- 
John Stoneham
(to email, reverse the domain)