Best Gnome alternative to UltraEdit?

Question

As I'm switching from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, I'm looking for an alternative to UltraEdit.

I tried a few tools, but they often lack some really useful features, such as:

• Syntax coloration
• FTP editing of files (access files on a FTP without using an external application)
• Character set management.

Which one do you use? And what are their major features?

Solution 1

geany is a lovely editor, but it uses GTK+ and not GNOME, so it doesn't have gnome-vfs/gvfs integration. bluefish has the gnome-vfs/gvfs integration, but is a bit on the buggy side. gvim is a bit harder to use and doesn't support FTP directly, but is very extensible. In the worst case you could use FUSE to mount the FTP directory onto your system.

Solution 2

Ultraedit is now available for Ubuntu. It's commercial, but fairly cheap and there is a free trial.

http://www.ultraedit.com/company/blog/products/ultraedit-for-linux-released.html

Solution 3

I just use plain old gedit. It has syntax highlighting and handles charsets.

For handling files on FTP shares I just mount them using the Places->"Connect to Server" functionality and then the remote files are easily accessible from gedit (or any other Gnome program for that matter).

Solution 4

In the spirit of cross-platform editors, I'd like to point to Scintilla and SciTE. Implementations are used in many IDEs and editors, available for Windows and Linux.

SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations - I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves.

SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12

Scintilla is a free source code editing component. It comes with complete source code and a license that permits use in any free project or commercial product.

As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and debugging source code. These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips. The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors, allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background colours and multiple fonts.

Solution 5

Kate supports syntax coloring and lots of charsets. I'm not sure what you mean by "ftp edition of files", but kate also includes a console, so you could use ftp from there.

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Comments

[Pierre-Yves Gillier]

I mean editing of files which are located on a FTP server without using an external app.

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

kate is also a KDE app, so it doesn't "fit in" with GNOME. Not that it's a problem to run it; just don't expect it to look like every other app.

[Pierre-Yves Gillier]

thx for advices. I'll test these ASAP.

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Syntax highlighting and charsets are all it has. That places it one step above notepad. An alternative to UltraEdit it is not.

[Pierre-Yves Gillier]

I tried Gedit/Gnome FTP but it's really unusable ATM :/ FTP is often disconnected and sometimes Gedit doesn't want to open the file...

[LiraNuna]

gnome-vfs/gvfs are deprecated anyway.

[Bruce van der Kooij]

@LiraNuna: GVFS is not deprecated, it replaced GnomeVFS. See: arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/09/…

[teukkam]

+1 for reminding me about SciTE.

[Roman A. Taycher]

KDEs filesystem abstraction which kate uses supports ftp and sftp among other protocols so you can edit it over ftp as if it were a local file.