First of all, an editor needs a clipboard. I've learned
the necessary tricks for Windows, pico and vi :
- For Windows, it's CTRL-C, CTRL-V and CTRL-X
- For pico, it's CTRL-K to erase a line and CTRL-U to paste a set of lines
- For vi, it's dd to erase a line and p to paste it.
The second nice-to-have thing is the ability to replay
keystrokes. pico has no such capability,
vi has limited capability by prefixing the number
of repetitions to a single command, and the Borland IDEs
and proton have that capability.
notepad lacks that capability. D'oh.
Syntax highlighting is nice eye-candy that helps immensely
when doing some TeX stuff. Both, proton and nedit
do that.
Being able to read (and maybe write) both, Unix and DOS
line endings is a sure plus, but not really necessary,
as I can convert stuff using Perl anyway.