SciTE is a lightweight, fast, and crystal clear text and code editor for those who love minimalism and efficiency. It is, however, a fully featured and highly customizable editor supporting tabbed files, code folding, and language specific syntax highlighting. It is one of my editor of choice for small projects : actually, I’m typing this article using it.

SciTE feels oldschool, a reminiscing gem from a software era when efficiency prevailed over complexity and bloating : in fact it feels so good that I decided to use FVWM (which is, for the record, the first Window Manager I ever used back in early 1996) to take a screenshot.

Some interesting facts and features :

• It is built upon Scintilla (a source code editing component), and is extendable through Lua scripts.
• Cross-platform (Good to note : the Windows version is just one single .EXE file!).
• Interesting selection features : SciTE allows rectangular block selection by holding the CTRL key (ALT key under Windows) while defining the selected area.
• Supports syntax highlighting and code folding for a large choice of languages.
• Fully customizable through a text based configuration file.