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When comparing Femto Emacs vs SciTE, the Slant community recommends SciTE for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source text editors for programming?” SciTE is ranked 26th while Femto Emacs is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose SciTE is:
It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Well documented
A long and well written tutorial teaches how to program in femtolisp and write extensions for Femto Emacs.
Pro Highly compatible with Emacs
If you know Emacs, you can start using Femto Emacs immediately.
Pro Very small footprint
The size of the executable file and the femtolisp library add up to only 500 k. The C source code is also small and well documented, so one can easily modify it. You can also use the source code to learn how to program a text editor.
Pro Very fast startup time
For small files, Femto Emacs starts up faster than emacs or vim.
Pro Flexible
It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.
Pro Lightweight
With less than 2 MB of binary on Windows, SciTE starts instantly. Plus, if you don't need all the config, syntax files, blah, there's a 678k standalone .exe version. Nothing is going to beat that for lightweight and start-up times. Stick it in a folder that is already on your PATH.
Pro Powerful
Based on the Scintilla source code editor, SciTE has some advanced features like rectangular editing, simple regular expression search and replace, code folding, etc. It allows the user to launch a compiler or interpreter, and it can also interpret the error messages, jumping at the location they point to.
Lua scripting is key to SciTE's power and flexibility. The Lua scripting language can be used to perform complex text transformations. It's relatively simple syntax and its large user-base makes it a great choice for a scripting feature.
Pro Built-in shell
The console window can show the result of ran commands (like build current file, reporting warnings, and errors), but also accept interactive shell commands.
Pro Portable
SciTE works on Windows and Linux, and it also has a commercial port on MacOS.
Pro Powerful syntax highlighting for numerous languages
Lexers providing folding and syntax highlighting are based on code, not on regular expressions. They support context, nesting, special rules, etc.
Pro Free (except on Mac) and open source
SciTE is written in C++, with lot of contributors, both to the core and to the numerous lexers.
Pro GUI
Has a simple graphical user interface
Cons
Con No syntax coloring for Latex
The distribution comes with syntax coloring examples for many languages, like Haskell, C, Lisp, Python, etc. However, there is no scheme for Latex. If you need syntax coloring for Latex, you will need to add your own color scheme.
Con Source distribution only
Femto Emacs is distributed only in source form. Therefore, you need to install ncurses, gcc and compile it with make and make install. There is no binary distribution. If you want mouse support, you need to program it in femtolisp or in C. This should not be a problem if you are a programmer, but can become an issue if you don't know Lisp or C. If you want to use femtolisp on Windows, you will need mingw and ncurses.
Con Hard to config
The configuration is mainly a file-based config, which can be unintuitive and difficult to use for new users.
Con Missing file browser
SciTE's greatest weakness is perhaps the file browser. It does not really have one, just a poor substitute which works a little bit like a terminal window with ls or dir commands to show the files in a directory.
Con Customization
No extensions, Themes.
