What is the latest SynEdit version or clone?
http://synedit.sourceforge.net has a link to the Unicode version.
SynEdit is much faster than any other text editor component. See the comparison benchmark here.
Currently I'm developing a new IDE for Arduino (official one is lack too much standard IDE features) to contribute to Arduino community. Since I want my IDE to run natively without rely on any VM and cross-platform is not my goal, so I took my o'good friend Delphi 7 and search for updated SynEdit VCL. Slightly dissapointing is it still has no very important feature: code folding (which you can say as "standard code editor feature" nowdays).
But after a little search I've found a descendant project which based on SynEdit which feature code folding: Mystix (hosted at SourceForge). You can simply overwrite your previous SynEdit source with this one (there is no new dpk package to install). It's based on SynEdit 2.0.1 anyway.
Documentation is a little vague (you have to throughfully examine the source code to get idea how to use it properly), but here is hint how to use the code folding feature:
SynEdit1.CodeFolding.FolderBarColor: = clDefault;
SynEdit1.CodeFolding.HighlighterFoldRegions: = False;
SynEdit1.CodeFolding.FoldRegions.Add(rtChar, False, False, True, '{', '}');
SynEdit1.CodeFolding.FoldRegions.Add(rtKeyword, False, False, True, '/*', '*/');
// and don't forget to initialize...
SynEdit1.InitCodeFolding;
// ... and enable it
SynEdit1.CodeFolding.Enabled: = True;
Mystix is released under same license as SynEdit (MPL).