gVim

GVim is a portable text editor that you can take with you and implement wherever you happen to be. There's a whole lot of editors on the market, and many of them have found it hard to set themselves apart from the competition. After all, the features you can pack into a text editor are usually subjective, and the most popular editors on the market are distinguished by how large a fan base builds up around them and how rich the user created library of extensions becomes. Clean design and modular structure are integral to the design of text editors. While gVim does the former incredibly well, it takes a somewhat unique path in lieu of the latter. Rather than create a tiny core editor around which modders can expand it, gVim is designed to start small and stay small, allowing it to be loaded up on a flash drive and taken with you wherever you happen to be. It's a neat idea that is perhaps likely to become outdated as the prevalence of online editors and cloud technology ensure that you can have access to all the tools you need without having to carry anything with you.

But just because gVim is tiny doesn't mean that it's basic. The developers have managed to pack a lot of functionality into this little package, and it's a strong enough platform to hang with some of the bigger boys on the market. It's unlikely you'll be modding gVim into a full fledged IDE (and there are certainly better alternatives on the market for those needs), but it's a strong challenger as far as straight up text editors targeted towards developers go. Multiple different languages are supported from day one, and a number of different add-ons mean that you can tailor together an editor that's suited to the needs of your preferred language and your specific project. All told, the developer boasts that they support hundreds of different languages and file types, and they include a robust and extensive search and replace program that is a necessity when working on larger projects. Combine this with their tree structure, and navigating the complex components of a massive project becomes significantly less of a hassle.

In terms of design, gVim isn't exactly the prettiest princess at the ball. It's effective and bare bones in terms of aesthetics, and that might scare off new users, but anyone who's been around the block in the development world will likely see it as par for the course. Learning the ins and outs of the platform requires a little bit of a learning curve, but once you figure out where everything is laid out, you should be able to access what you need intuitively. This is a text editor that markets itself on its ability to go anywhere, but its real value comes from its all around versatility.