Programmer's File Editor

Programmer's File Editor is a freeware text editor targeted particularly to the needs of software programmers. It was written by Alan Phillips of Lancaster University in the north of England. Development of Programmer's File Editor ceased in 1999, but the program is still in use by some programmers. It was featured in a report about free software in an episode of the BBC series The Net.

Features

Strengths of the editor include:

ability to run programs against the current file and capture their output in another window
easy macro recorder and editor; macros can be saved and assembled into "libraries"
line breaks, tabs, and other special characters allowed in search and replace
file type recognition
using batch files to perform compilation tasks from within the editor
Customizable screen display; display and other characteristics can be set for specific file types, both pre-fab and user determined
Multiple document interface (MDI) with tiling and minimizing supported
Keyboard remapping allows editor to be extensively reconfigured to one's personal taste
Printer formatting is versatile
fast even on very large files as editor does not try to understand the text being edited

Weaknesses of the editor include:

lack of published source code means there have been no updates for years
unique default keyboard shortcuts for search and replace although these problems can be easily overcome by using Options->Key mapping to reprogram these shortcuts.
Tends to lock up when opening unusually long files, or files with excessively long lines
Lack of Unicode support.
inability to fold code
no support for regular expressions in find/change
no support for redo and only limited undo
no support for language specific Syntax highlighting