A review of Diakonos came to my attention today. It was written by Damian Gawęda on his blog. Some excerpts:

I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.

Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos. Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box.

To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.

And my reply:

Hi, Damian. Thank you for the positive review of Diakonos! I’m glad you were pleased by my “it just works” approach to designing and developing Diakonos. Indeed, my experiences with emacs and vi were frustrating, so I decided to take a stab at rolling my own editor.

I’ll be the first to confess that Diakonos is not fast [yet]. I will take 95% of the blame for that, and leave 5% for Ruby and other things. There are various algorithms and internal process approaches which could stand for refactoring. See this wiki page for tips on how to speed Diakonos up, though.

The multi-lingual syntax highlighting is a known issue. As a workaround, you can temporarily change the highlight language of the whole file with Alt-Shift-T. Change to ‘php’ or ‘java’ (for Javascript) when those are your embedded languages. Also, try playing with larger values for the view.lookback setting. This will make more demands on your hardware, but it may solve the highlighting problem in more cases than not.

If you have any feature requests or anything, feel free to drop me a line, either in IRC (chat.freenode.net #mathetes; or http://chat.purepistos.net ) or by e-mail at the e-mail address I used here on your blog. User interest and feedback always motivates me, and I value user feedback.

Thanks again for trying and using Diakonos!