[German]Today a small guest article by blog reader Andreas H. (alias dinkumoil on GitHub and SourceForge), who has been involved in the open source software project CudaText (text editor for several platforms).
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Looking for a good text editor for multiple platforms? Or just try a new editor out of curiosity? Then the open source software project CudaText could be something. The author is an experienced Russian developer, who has already developed the editor SynWrite in the past years (development stopped meanwhile). It can be installed in TotalCommander as a text viewer plugin, but also exists as a standalone program.
The CudaText project at a glance
The CudaText project is characterized by a fast progressing development and a very active, helpful and promptly reacting developer. The program itself is a cross-platform project, running on Windows, Mac OS X, various Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Solaris.
Supported processor platforms are Intel 32/64 Bit and ARM/AArch64. In terms of functionality it can definitely compete with veterans of the genre such as Notepad++, in some areas CudaText is even better.
The software is developed in Object Pascal with the Open Source IDE Lazarus and the Free Pascal Compiler (both also cross-platform). The cooperation on the project is very welcome and possible with a GitHub account without any problems.
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CudaText Features
Cuda means "miracle" or "miracle" in some Slavic languages. If you look at the variety of supported platforms alone, this is a legitimate term. But also the list of features is long and varied.
- The most important feature: CudaText can be extended via plugins (programmed in Python).
- The editor provides an extensive programming interface, which is continuously extended.
The developer always keeps the very detailed documentation of the editor and the programming interface up to date. This not only allows urgently needed functions to be retrofitted at short notice, but also very extensive extensions that are not required by all users.
Accordingly, there is a large number of useful plugins that can be listed, installed and, of course, uninstalled via an integrated plugin manager. Among them are some goodies like a text comparison plugin, with which differences in two versions of a document can be highlighted in color and transferred to the other document, or an SQL plugin, with which the results of queries from various database servers can be displayed directly in the editor.
But also features like sorting functions, synchronous scrolling of two open documents or synchronous editing of all occurrences of a word within a selected text area are retrofitted as plugins.
Notes on the program
It takes some time getting used to for Windows users, because that there is no settings dialog box. Program settings (and there are a lot of them!) are configured via a text file in JSON format. There is a plugin that makes this a bit easier by using a full text search to search the displayed list of settings and set their value. This approach has become more and more popular with text editors in recent years.
Also the command list is such a feature, the text editor Sublime made it known. Displayed via main menu entry or key combination, it provides a full text search for all available commands. In the latest version, which will be released shortly, it is also possible to search for currently opened files and filter the results for plugins and lexers via the command list.
The program does not need to be installed, the download consists of a ZIP file that can be unpacked to any directory where you have write permission. In case of an update (happens several times a month) the new version only has to be unpacked into the already existing directory.
If you have adapted themes, Lexer or other standard configuration files, new versions should be unpacked into a separate directory. aösp use the text comparison plugin. However, the normal user settings are stored in a separate directory, which is NOT overwritten by the update.
As a conclusion I can only recommend everyone to have a look at the program. The commitment of the developer is exemplary and guarantees a constant further development of the project. It should also be mentioned that depending on your personal possibilities you should either participate in the work on the project in the form of code or make a small donation (see "Sponsor" button in the GitHub repository) if you use CudaText regularly. This is the only way Open Source will work in the long run.
Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CudaText
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Alexey-T/CudaText
SourceForge Repository: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cudatext/
Homepage & Forum: http://www.uvviewsoft.com/cudatext/
Download: https://www.fosshub.com/CudaText.html
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