The greatest improvement that’s waiting to happen is visualizing text. I’m talking about allowing the user to take XML blob’s like
xyz
and displaying single references or all references as a little blue nicely shaped box that’s recognizable for the user.

In practice this would translate to adding extra modes to emacs, such as graphical tree-visualizations for Java code or XML documents.

If you want more info, feel free to drop me a line.

2. Regular expression based incremental find and replace.

3. Editor startup should be blindingly fast.

4. No highlighting or intelligent intending nonsense please… Nobody does it perfectly. No folding either. Simple character matching (% in vi) should be enough.

5. No tabbed interface or MDI.

6. Embed a sane language without a steep learning curve (lua) for both scripting and configuration.

7. Must work in unix terminals and win32 command prompt. The JASSPA Emacs GUI is spiffy IMO…

8. Ability to hardwrap long lines (like vi), or keep long lines and wrap for display only (notepad).

8.1. Ability to join hardwrapped lines.

And I’d give up vi to use this editor.

One thing I’d love to see in any new text editor would be the ability to understand the language being written at any point (even down to html within php files, or sql within vb files) and highlight accordingly. Very very tricky, yes, but would be a great help.

Decent, intelligent, collapsing of sections is a must, again in all languages. Including the ability to select a whole section of text and collapse everything either side of it (so you just see the bit you selected).

The ability to go “back” within a file (i.e., click “back” (or a keyboard shortcut of course) to go to the point in the same file you were previously working on).

Configurable “send to” dialog (i.e., send file to browser for testing, or to ftp and so on).

Regex-based find and replace (EditPlus is awesome for that) (across multiple files, e.g., all in folder or all open).

I rather like that I can set Visual Studio up to work with whatever unit testing software I’m using. Same with things like version control.

Speaking of Visual Studio, I also like it’s “Go To Definition” functionality and intellisense.

All that is of course in addition to tabbed editing, code highlighting, spellchecking, configurable word wrap (none, full screen or number of characters), matching brace (or end of block) highlighting, auto-indentation (where relevant).

That would make me pretty happy.