> You're telling me that you've never shouldered an old handset? Inconceivable!

Sure I've done it, including, as I mentioned, with a towel as an aid, but still I don't get good use of both hands for typing. E.g., today I paid two bills on-line. I used my computer for the URLs, UIDs, PWs, of the Web sites, which didn't work. Then I used a voice phone call finding and dialing the number from my main PC via my text editor. Then I used the telephone voice response and telephone touch tone pad to do the work but had my paper based checkbook right there, open, and used with a pen to record my side of the transaction. I wouldn't have wanted to have tried any of that while traveling and/or with a mobile device.

Notepad++ sounds like a decent editor. So is KEdit! Since I've got about 150 macros for KEdit I wrote in their version of Rexx, I won't change. But Notepad++ might be help make some mobile computer that won't run KEdit more useful.

Your idea of sync is not nearly the same as mine. My view of sync is two files or two hierarchical file systems where, roughly, want to make them equal by keeping the latest inputs and also honoring appropriate deletes. Not so easy to do well in general.

Your view of sync is much simpler and looks like essentially just a file server that permits at most one user at a time. Fine. That would be very useful. And maybe there would be a drive letter remote mount command so that could access the file system on a public service such as you mentioned.

But for that approach to sync, what I had in mind was just leaving my main PC (likely with Windows Server when I get that far) on all the time and using it, in part, as a remote file server, for my Windows XP, 7 system, Windows phone, or iPhone if I have one and it can use Windows Server as a file server. Then I communicate between the mobile device and my main server with Windows Server with a VPN. Then since the server is locked inside my house, maybe I will trust in the Fourth Amendment and not encrypt the files as they are on the server but use the encryption in VPN for security. Then I'll try not to have any serious files on my mobile device. Then losing the mobile device might not be a huge security problem.

I'm sure Windows Server can provide the functionality I'd need to use it as a file server from some mobile devices over VPN. Then with your definition of sync, which has functionality fine with me, the whole sync problem goes away simply because I can't be in two places at once and in one place would have no great reason to be using two client devices connected to the server at once!

That is, net, for files on a mobile device, I'd just use VPN to connect to my main file server which, for all purposes, has the one and only copy of the file (except for backups). That is, client devices, mobile, even Windows XP or 7, just don't have local copies of the files and, thus, don't have files that need my complicated version of sync.

I tried to indicate that I wanted to use Windows Server as a file server in this way. What I don't know is, what mobile devices can use Windows Server and VPN for all their file access? For security in case I lose control of the mobile device, I want all copies of all files on the mobile device to be deleted, and really deleted like overwritten and really gone and out'a here.

I'm guessing that a lot of people are going to be highly concerned about data security for mobile devices, e.g., with local police grabbing mobile devices, the FBI/NSA snooping, mobile payments, bitcoins, serious work with confidential data done on a mobile device, etc. For me for now, my solution to all those problems is not to use a mobile device (I do have one someone gave me, but I don't use it!), and all like right now within a millisecond as I push this little button which does not stop and ask me "Do you really want to delete all those files?".

My approach to an IDE seems to be unique: To me, especially for the code I'm writing for my business, the most important content is not the executable statements but various kinds of comments. When I return to some code after a month, to heck with reading the darned code, even though the code is typed with beautiful indentation rules, long, mnemonic identifier names, simple approaches to classes, if-then-else, log file writing, and exceptional condition handling, and, instead, just read the comments. When I have questions, sometimes the comments have cross references typically with a 'target' such as

     '  Modified at 23:13:45 on Friday, July 19th, 2013.

which is in VB comment syntax and from a macro in KEdit. But when there are not enough cross references (e.g., where the heck is this variable declared, set, used, changed?; e.g., in this file of code, what are all the functions/subroutines declared?), I use the nicely functional locate facilities of KEdit souped up with some of my own macros.

Two of the biggies for my approach to an IDE are:

(1) Screen Real Estate. I'd like a huge screen or several huge screens but so far am staying with the very nice NEC 17 inch CRT I got when I plugged together my Windows XP system. I will plug together a Windows 7 system with a bigger screen, but not today.

So, for more screen real estate, when writing code typically I have about a dozen windows open. And I have some little programs of my own in ObjectRexx to arrange the windows in nice ways. Then I can bring any of the dozen windows to the top of the Z order and use it without moving any windows. So, I have close enough to a dozen screens.

For

> keyword highlighting, bracket highlighting

KEdit has some of that functionality, but I want nothing to do with it and keep it turned off in KEdit! About all I let my editor know that is "language specific" is the comment syntax!

To me one of the great things in computing is that source code is still essentially just simple text in essentially just old 7 bit ASCII. Such text is really easy to handle in many ways!

Net, I find that just making basic use of the windowing system of Windows is a better way to display information for my coding than the panels in, say, Visual Studio.

(2) Documentation. My code has links to lots of external documentation. Some of this I wrote; some more are HTML of articles from, say, Stack Overflow or some Microsoft forum, but most of them are from the 4000+ Web pages I have from MSDN. So, each such Web page I have described, abstracted, in a text file I maintain with KEdit, and the abstracting is usually good enough to let me find, with a KEdit key word locate operation, the right Web page when I need it. Then in my code, I insert, say,

     '    SortedList Class
     '    H:/data05/projects/software/vb/msdn475.htm

where, of course, the tree name is on my file system of a Web page from MSDN and the line above is the title of the Web page. Then, right, one keystroke in KEdit, using a macro I wrote, causes Firefox to display the Web page. So, that's most of my replacement of Microsoft's Intellisense, and my version gives me the whole MSDN Web page from which, of course, I can use the subtree there to walk to related materials.

I have to type into something, and hopefully the programs I type into can be small in number and high in functionality. So, KEdit is mostly what I type into. For me, its macro language, based on Rexx, is most of what makes it great. There's no way I want to type into Visual Studio instead of KEdit.

So far I don't want a mobile device. In time as I do more traveling I may have to become mobile, and then I will be highly concerned about security, will want to keep essentially all data on my main server in my home/office, and access it via VPN. The sync problem will go away because for each file, there will be only one copy and that on my file server (except for backups). Then, right, for an editor for, say, light work on a mobile device, I'd still hope to use KEdit but otherwise would have to try Notepad++, emacs, vi, etc.