When one has used a great, free text editor for years, it's probably about time to say thank you. Therefore, first of all, I'd like to thank the developpers of Crimson Editor, my favourite editor. It's free, slim, stable, offers a neat tabular interface, handy syntax highlighting, and a lot of other features, combined with great ease of use. I can only recommend it to anyone looking for a nice, user-friendly text editor.
I've just got two small suggestions and wonder if anyone shares my thoughts. Both concern Unicode support which was added just in time before I thought, working in the localization industry, I had to switch to another editor.
I've got to say that for “encoding-intensive” tasks, I prefer EM Editor (often combined with a hex editor), a must for any localization professional with its excellent encoding detection. However, for my daily coding needs, I always enjoy to return to the nice Crimson Editor interface.
I would like to be able to make UTF-8 w/o BOM the default encoding
As, unfortunately, this nice application has not seen any new release in over two years and Unicode support was added relatively late, it is still quite basic – but sufficient. There's just one thing that could make my life much easier: There is no such thing as encoding detection in CE (which is not a problem for me), and the default encoding with which every new file is opened is still ASCII. Now, when I edit html templates, work on Perl scripts or edit XML and other text files, I usually use UTF-8 without BOM. I think there should be a way to make this the default encoding for new and newly opened files; the good thing would be that with code that has to be pure ASCII, you would not have to worry about anything either as long as you don't use special characters (which you probably would not want to do anyway), because for these basic characters, UTF-8 and ASCII are byte-identical.
Right now, every time I open a file the first thing, I have got to do is to change the encoding type to UTF-8 and confirm that I want to reload the document – it's just two simple steps, but repeating them every single time one opens a file can get annoying.
Please don't write “Unicode and UTF-8 encoding”
I don't know who started using Unicode as a synonym for UTF-16 – some people blame Microsoft – but even if by now this terminological mistake is quite wide-spread, it is still a mistake.
- There is Unicode: each character in the world has a unique numeric value (code point) assigned to it.
- Then there are different ways of translating these character values into bits (with fixed length vs. variable length as one important consideration), UTF-16 and UTF-8 being the most widespread ones (both variable length).
Therefore, it would make sense to say that you support “Unicode, including UTF-8” or that you support “Unicode, both UTF-8 and UTF-16”, but saying that you support Unicode and UTF-8 is like saying that you drink both single-malt whisky and Highland Park.
I know this may sound a bit fussy and Microsoft, EM Editor and a thousand others got it wrong as well. I have even heard people who call themselves localization experts answer my question as to whether a particular file was UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded “neither, it's just normal Unicode”. However,since a logical terminology does exist, why not use it instead of making it illogical?
In spite of these two criticism, once again, I really like and recommend Crimson Editor – and by the way, if you are into single-malt whisky, you should totally try Highland Park, it's my favourite.
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