Also , I’ve tried both Atom and VS Code several times, but both of them are too slow to use on my old Thinkpad T520
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I don’t think it is people being defensive, it’s just that your requirements are conflicting and unclear (especially “modern” — I am still not sure what you mean by that). You want something fast on old hardware (Vim and Emacs are precisely that; Electron-based apps are resource hogs), but specifically rule out Vim and Emacs.
If the main concern is the keybindings, you can customize Emacs, Vim, VS Code, or pretty much any currently maintained editor to the keybindings of your choice. For some sets of keybindings, you will find specific packages to make it easy (eg cua-mode in Emacs).
However, if you prefer Textadept and can invest the effort to make it work with Julia, that’s great! When you are done, please consider making it available on Github, possibly under
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I am also confused how you define “modern”. To me it seems like you want something where you can do everything with a mouse (from your statement: “I want an editor that doesn’t use a lot of arcane and obscure key bindings”)? Emacs has a GUI and fully supports the mouse. It can even display inline graphics, you can resize nested windows and scroll using the mouse wheel etc. Moreover it has features like multiple cursors, embedded Git information and so on I think these are “modern” in that sense.
Whether a mouse is useful and really increases the productivity is of course another topic (and my personal opinion is “no way” 
).
Maybe you just try Spacemacs (with Emacs instead of Vim keybindings, which you will be asked at the setup), I know that it has a Julia layer which can easily be activated but I don’t know much more. I use Doom Emacs with eglot-jl.
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Regardless of motivation, “I have considered vim and emacs and they’re not what I want” is a valid preference and I think we should avoid challenging it. I don’t think we’re helping by suggesting variants of vim and emacs here – and I say that as someone who would recommend vim over pretty much everything else out there 
That said – I don’t know of any editors that meet the criteria posted, so I’m at a loss. If you were on Mac, I would have a couple other suggestions (but even these might violate your “open source” requirement), but for Linux? I’m hard-pressed to think of anything.
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You might try Notepadqq (modeled after Notepad++) or Gedit. Neither are widely used on the Julia community, but (I think) they both support Julia syntax highlighting, and they meet your main criteria.
That said, I think VSCode is the best for almost anyone starting out with Julia and with an editor. It is reasonably fast for most. It’s used by 51% of folks in the 2019 StackOverflow developer survey. In the 2019 Julia user and developer survey, 31% of folks use VSCode frequently (second to Atom at 41%). In the 2019 Julia survey, if you strike out the options that don’t meet your criteria (Atom, VSCode, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text [not open source], and Notepad++ [Windows only]), there’s almost nothing left that people regularly use for Julia.
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Notepadqq. Thank you. That meets my criteria.
Gedit is a great suggestion, since it is used by Ubuntu and thus is surely maintained. It has themes, some custom highlighting features and a script runner (plus you can write your own plugins with Python). I use it very often for quick edits from terminal, to avoid starting VSCode.
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@anon94023334 I agree with you. I only “insisted” since many people say “I tried vim and emacs and I gave up” while the truth is: they launched it once, weren’t able to edit a file and were frustrated within a minute until they gave up completely. I think that’s a bit unfortunate since otherwise these editors meet all the requirements
Never mind, I’ll shut up.
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@tamasgal it’s all good Again, I’d be willing to help get people up to speed on vim, but I don’t want to push too hard.
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No need to push. Most people eventually end up using vim or Emacs on their own, the great attractors of the editor space. It may just take a couple of decades, and/or investing in one or two fancy IDEs that promise to be the Next Big Thing and end up being abandonned in a few years.
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Except when there is a repellor around the attractor. On Windows I can’t get the terminal running Julia. 
Hi Petr, I just discovered that Textadept actually does have multi-cursors, via a module. https://foicica.com/wiki/multi-edit. I haven’t tried this out yet, though.
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Multi-cursors should work in Textadept without the need for an extra module.
As for the Julia lexer for Textadept/Scintillua, a lexer was just added and should show up in the next nightly build/release.
https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua/blob/default/lexers/julia.lua
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That sounds promising. At the moment TA is crashing with multiple cursors.
Please file a bug over at Issues · orbitalquark/textadept · GitHub
Works for me, but crashes always worth investigating!
Yes, I’ve been trying to do that, but the error is no longer reproducible. Somehow I changed the way I did it the first few times, and now it works.
Yet another text editor candidate: Cudatext CudaText - Pazera Software
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Thanks for the pointer. Cudatext seems awesome!
CudaText is indeed very nice (and super fast), the maintainer just fixed their Julia lexer too. If you’re into minimalist non-electron based text editors, it’s worth a try