OSDev.org

I use Sublime Text on Windows for most stuff. It's the perfect balance of "lightweight but with useful features" for my needs.

On Linux I use Nano. I know people prefer other editors, and I've really tried to get to grips with their keybindings, but muscle memory dies hard and Nano is good enough IMO.

Speaking of collapseable code blocks, I've been using Fed, "the folding text editor," under DOS. It's got an odd set of keybindings and a few minor bugs, but in general, it's pretty good for a DOS editor. The feature I like best is that the menu bar and scroll bar hide until you mouse over them. And its screensaver is Conway's game of life in pretty colors.

I previously used Elvis for a couple of weeks. It's got some good points, but like any old VI, its multi-file support is pretty poor, always demanding you save before switching and offering no quick switch to files which aren't the previous, next, first or last. Elvis's is worse than average; it doesn't remember the cursor position when you switch to another file. And this is the latest version of Elvis, dating from 2003, 13 years after its first release. On the plus side, it's easily configurable and the DOS port fits into conventional memory, just barely. That's why I chose it over Vim; avoiding bloat on principle, though I've known for years that the hate for bloat is not intrinsically rational. Elvis runs out of memory trying to load some of its HTML help pages and can run out while syntax hilighting tiny C files. I've installed Vim32 which is remarkably fast, (Elvis feels a little hesitant,) but it's only a little better at switching files so I'll probably stick with Fed.

Old VIs are ridiculously irritating. Forcing you to save before switching files is one thing. Arbitrarily preventing you from backspacing into text before the point you started appending is another. This also prevents you from deleting indentation in autoindent mode; it's a real pain. Elvis arbitrarily does or doesn't do that; I'm not sure what the rules are. Vim got over it at some point in the 00s, if I remember right. Watcom VI is fine, it's a professional product, but it lacks some features I use. Besides, the display is 'noisy' with a full IBM-spec TUI.

Huh... Wikipedia says Elvis was the first progressive vi. That deletion-denying bug makes it much more unpleasant than other (non-VI) 90s editors. Vim was the same in the 90s. Now I think of it, the multi-file support was also worse than anything else in the 90s. I don't know how any version of VI survived into this century except by people somehow getting used to it and developing muscle memory. Just-about any other editor was more convenient, even Emacs. Emacs was also far more powerful at the turn of the century, but I guess Vim rose to challenge it in the 00s. I suppose it is nice to have so many powerful cursor-movement commands at your finger-tips. I miss that in Fed, a little, but not much.

I think I made a mistake comparing old VIs to other 90s editors; I'm feeling pretty negative now. Old VIs won't let you quit unless you are on the last file, no matter how many times you've been back and forth editing and saving them all. Why would you ever write an editor to do that?

I prefer using SciTE for editing. I need a programming editor that lets me customize key mapping. SciTE is very customizable and I've been able to add functionality as needed. I use it for a variety of tasks. It's also Open Source and cross-platform portable.