When I used a windows machine, I always used a text editor called PSPad. I like to store information and notes for myself in the the form of text files, since they're lightweight and readable on any platform. This usually involves lots of tables. PSPad had a couple of features which I found very useful for this. First, if you enabled something called "smart tabs", then, if there were words past the current point in current line in the line above, the cursor would jump to the first letter of the next word. For instance, it would jump to all of the positions where the pipe character is, in succession, in the third line below:
-header1- -header2- -header3- table column 1 column 2 col3 abc | | | | |
Second, the text editing area looked and acted like a grid. There was a ruler across the top showing column numbers just like the line numbers along the left side, and furthermore (tho this could be annoying with accidental clicks with a fingermouse), if you clicked somewhere past the end of the text on a line, the cursor would go exactly where you clicked and the editor would create spaces at the end of the line to fill in the gap. Using the arrow key past the end of a line would also act as a spacebar, tho I rarely did that.
Well, now I have a MacBook Pro, and I have tried many Mac-only and cross-platform text editors, but none of them have had these features or behavior.
I have been able to get PSPad to run on Wine.app, so I ought to be able to use it for my note-taking needs, but a cross-platform text editor that can do something like this would be nice.
