Komodo Edit

As a developer I have been searching an editor or IDE that could adapt to every need I could have. This search has been frustrating and not productive. Finally I have accepted the fact that there is no tool that will accomplish what I expected so now I work with a combination of utilities and editors.

Normally my developer time is spend in Linux, there I use gVim or vim. Sometimes when I have to work from home or a client I do it on my laptop that runs Windows Vista. There I recently have been using Komodo Edit. In the search for the perfect IDE I have seen ActiveState Komodo IDE tons of times, but it is available freely only as a Demo. Now ActiveState has released Komodo Edit completely for free and it comes with a set of features that covers my needs.

Also Komodo Edit can be extended using xpi files (the same as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird). And there is a community site where you can find this extensions. There are few extensions available now, but when the userbase grows I'm sure they will grow in number.

The features I use more or love more are autocomplete, the calltips, the Django syntax highlighting, block ident/unident, block comment/uncomment, and the multi-edit capability. Even though the space in the laptop screen is reduced (13" compared to the 19" + 19" + 17" that I use at my desktop), I can navigate with very little effort through all my code.

There is even a vim emulation mode! I haven't tried it yet, but for heavy vi users it could be a choice if you wish to explore other editors. There is a linux version but for now I still prefer to use only gVim. It is enough.

So the search is over for now, maybe in a couple of months I will go back to the search of the perfect tool, but for now I think I can use this tools and be productive enough.