When comparing Synwrite vs Femto Emacs, the Slant community recommends Synwrite for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source text editors for programming?” Synwrite is ranked 36th while Femto Emacs is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Synwrite is:
Synwrite has a clean and beautiful UI.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean interface
Synwrite has a clean and beautiful UI.
Pro Small size and portable
Synwrite's small size makes it very portable and usable even from a USB flash drive.
Pro Built-in FTP support
Built-in support for FTP allows the user to transfer and exchange files between different computers and accounts.
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.
Cons
Con Windows only
Synwrite is only available for Windows and it's not cross-platform.
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.