In my quest to find the text editor that fulfills all of my needs and desire on Linux, I have come to the conclusions that it doesn’t exist. A couple come very close, i.e. jEdit and gEdit, but there are a few things with each of them that annoy me.

I don’t like the fact that jEdit runs in Java and is not native to the OS, and apart from that I have tried to file bug and feature requests for a couple of the plugins that I feel, wither don’t work quite right or need just a little more to be excellent. But development seems to be slow or no one seems to respond to these requests. It is a very frustrating situation. I could write a plugin for jEdit as I used to develop for many years in java, but I find it to be a pain to work with, and as pointed out in a previous post, I would rather never have to use it again.

gEdit while good, just falls down in many areas. It is nowhere near as feature rich as jEdit (with plugins), and the task of me trying to write plugins for it just frustrated me, because of some limitations.

So what is a programmer to do huh? Well I guess program. So now, being that I am a ruby developer, I am going to embark on a project that will probably take years. And that is to write my own text editor. in ruby using its gtk bindings, which will be solely for Linux I guess, or any other OS with gtk support.

Seeing as I love jEdit, it will be my base, I actually would just like a straight port of jEdit in in ruby/gtk. I will call it rEdit inkeeping with what seems the norm.

We’ll see how it goes. Watch this space.

I think that I will host a wiki for it at http://redit.ivercore.com