Text editor

CudaText

We've made it through a couple of months without giving in to the temptation of reviewing yet another text editor. But CudaText is worth the break because it genuinely offers some unique features that other text editors don't. It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a text editor designed to help you with NVidia's GPU processing platform, CUDA, as its name might imply. CudaText is instead an editor written with the Lazarus IDE in the Pascal programming language, a language that might be familiar to anyone who studied computer science in the '80s or '90s (like me!). This might also help to explain its best feature, because CudaText is truly cross-platform. And we don't just mean Linux, Windows, and macOS. We mean FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, and even Haiku. CudaText runs on all of these, sometimes making it the platform's best GUI-driven text editor. We only wish there was an additional Amiga version.

This is important because CudaText is crammed full of modern features. There's a tabbed UI (optionally powered by Qt on Linux), regular expression support, syntax highlighting, code folding, multiple splits, and a JSON configuration file. There's even code completion and picture preview if you're editing HTML or CSS files. But the real power comes from a plugin system that can extend the regular functionality with extra options to help with your specific tasks. There's a snippet library for code clips, spellchecker, code linter, diff viewer, and merge manager, plus tools for managing an entire project tree and individual sessions. After adding a few plugins, CudaText can start to feel more like an IDE than a text editor, and that's what makes it so powerful. It's a good, functional editor without any further modification, but if your needs grow, the editor can also grow with your project. And it works on almost any system you're likely to have encountered over the past 20 years.

Project Website

https://cudatext.github.io/index.html

CudaText brings new meaning to "cross platform," but we do wish there was an Amiga version.

MIDI librarian