What is the best alternative to SciTE?

Kate can be a little hard to install and configure, especially for beginners. On Linux or BSD, it can be easily installed from your distribution's repositories.

Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features.

Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search.

Atom has a relatively high memory usage, especially when compared to some other text editors not based on Electron. For those who develop on the go, this also tends to mean shorter battery life.

Tends to crash or hang with large >(10MB) text files, making it less useful as a general text editor.

Atom is very slow to startup, which is a big disadvantage if you are accustomed to using it to make quick changes on your files.

Gedit is a text editor. Though it's simple and fast, it misses a lot of features, most notably auto-complete for several languages.

For example, finding anything in the settings menu is hard. Most other text editors use Edit->Preferences for managing settings but this is not the case for Gedit.

Although Howl can be extended in both Lua and MoonScript, almost all bundles are written in MoonScript. This means that it is a bit harder to find examples if you'd rather write your bundle in Lua. MoonScript can be compiled to Lua but the code won't be as clean and understandable as if it...

Howl is still under active development and it's not stable yet. Features may change in the future.

Spacemacs combines many packages from many different authors that were never designed to work together. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways, and things randomly break as one package interferes with another's features. This combined with delayed auto-loading of packages in unpredictable...

Although configuration is heavily loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. Emacs can be run as a daemon though which reduces the client's startup time to a few milliseconds.

To configure Spacemacs, settings for Emacs/Evil/Spacemacs may need editing. It's not always clear which need to be changed or how to change settings globally: sometimes hooks are needed, other times Spacemacs provides options.

A lot of very long lines can make MacVim take up to a minute to open, where a few other editors take only a few seconds to load the same file.

MacVim after all is still Vim, and with that comes the complexity that Vim brings and the difficult learning curve that needs to be overcome.

You'll spend a lot of time learning all the commands and modes supported in Vim. You'll then spend more time tuning settings to your needs. Although once it's tuned to your needs, you can take your .vimrc to any machine you need and have the same experience across all your computers.

Many plugins depend on optional Python and Lua features, which may or may not be included in whatever binaries are available for your system. And without platform-specific hacks, it is difficult for plugins to operate in the background or use external tooling.

Though basic features like syntax checking, autocompletion, and file management are all available out of the box or with minimal configuration, this is not obvious to new users, who might get intimidated or assume they need to install complex plugins just so they can have this functionality. Other...

Sublime Text protects and copyrights its code and is thus not the freedom-ware some would like it to be.

Here's a rough comparison: a 70 MB file takes about 2 seconds to load in Notepad++, whereas the same file in ST3 takes over 10 seconds to load.

Sublime Text offers poor support for Far-East languages in Linux.

While it's better than it used to be, with most functions being possible through the menu, Emacs is still quite a bit different from your standard editor. You'll need to learn new keyboard shortcuts.

For example, for navigation it uses the b, n, p, l keys. Which for some people may seem strange. But don't worry, you can change it.

Only the text area can be themed, and it doesn't have as many features as browser-based text areas.

While it can run in Wine, it is native only to Windows.

It may be hard to find good plugins for relatively new languages.

Some gaps have to be filled by plugins, while these features should be built in. For example: Jump to matching brace (bracket / parenthesis); Gutter selection of lines; Recall previous searches / replacements; Autofill of search field with text under caret (text has to be selected...

Though the website says there is an update available, the updater in Brackets may give you an error, resulting in you having to download updates manually.

Komodo Edit is not very lightweight and that can slow it down during startup.

Synwrite is only available for Windows and it's not cross-platform.

Slap is written in JavaScript and it requires something to interpret it in a local machine. That something is node.js, but for people who don't need node, it would be a hindrance and an overkill to install node just to use a simple text editor. Furthermore, it can only be used remotely if the...

Slap only runs through the terminal.

Does not have an IRC channel or some kind of forum where a community of developers/plugin writers could evolve around. Has a mailing list which is said to be active but that does not feel that attractive.

At the time of writing this, no equivalents to gVim exist.

Neovim is not available for many legacy platforms. The Windows version is currently considered experimental.

As of yet, Neovim is in an unstable point in it's development. There is no stable release and using it for the moment should be done with caution as many features may change in the future.