Comparison: Linux Text Editors 402
jrepin writes: Mayank Sharma of Linux Voices tests and compares five text editors for Linux, none of which are named Emacs or Vim. The contenders are Gedit, Kate, Sublime Text, UltraEdit, and jEdit. Why use a fancy text editor? Sharma says, "They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text. Some simple text editors even exceed their design goals thanks to plugins that infuse them with capabilities to rival text-centric apps from other genres. They can take on the duties of a source code editor and even an Integrated Development Environment."
Have you seen Gedit lately? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen Gedit lately? Its new user interface is even less usable that vi's is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedit#mediaviewer/File:Gedit_3.11.92.png [wikipedia.org]
The Gnome designers just keep making Gnome's user interface worse and worse to use. I guess that's why so few people use Gnome these days!
Geany (Score:4, Informative)
Where's geany? It's much better than gedit.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you used Vim lately? With its multitude of plugins, it's hard to make the point that it's an editor from the Stone Age. I sometimes switch to editors like Sublime and always find myself coming back to Vim. It's extremely powerful, allows me to do complicated edits and movements, and it has all the features I'd expect in any GUI editor.
Stop being a prick. Not everyone uses vi/vim because it's "cool". Many of us use it because it's simply more productive to do so.
Obligatory xkcd cartoon (Score:3, Informative)
http://xkcd.com/378/
Even if you don't personally engage in editor wars, it's pretty funny. I'm afraid that the number of Slashdot articles best answered by an XKCD cartoon has remained surprisingly consistent.
Given that most of the tools in the mentioned article require a GUI to work from, and many of them are destabilized by their use of Java, I'm afraid that the article will remain aimed at GUI and web developers, not "real programmers". We who do real systems recovery or kernel level code development will continue to use "vi" for small tasks, "emacs" when we need full integration with source control systems or more powerful indentation..
Re:Geany (Score:5, Informative)
Re:GUI = fail (Score:2, Informative)
I see you're used to Linux boxes with X installed. *BSD doesn't necessarily have X installed and it would be highly unlikely on a firewall box. Also, sshd might not have X11 forwarding turned on.
Not to mention, it's actually nvi not vi or vim.
Re:What's there to compare? (Score:4, Informative)
But but but.. the newer editors are different! """They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text. Some simple text editors even exceed their design goals thanks to plugins that infuse them with capabilities to rival text-centric apps from other genres. They can take on the duties of a source code editor and even an Integrated Development Environment."""
Next you'll be pulling my leg and telling me that emacs and vim can do that stuff too. You sound like the skeptical sort of person who refuses to believe the words of truth that flow from the marketing departments.
(do I really need to mark this as sarcasm, on the one hand it's obvious, but on the other hand this is slashdot)
Re:Pfft (Score:0, Informative)
in some places, such as /etc/fstab
Those places are called "text files"
you need to make sure there's a /n at the end of every line,
Please tell me you're kidding
including the last one.
Oh the insight. /n), then you're not dealing with a text file.
Protip: If your last line doesn't end in a newline (which is commonly represented by \n, not
Stop mentioning vi and emacs (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, y'all can stop mentioning how vi and emacs do everything these do plus come preinstalled on Linux systems. From the article:
Two of most popular and powerful plain text editors are Emacs and Vim. However, we didn’t include them in this group test for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you are using either, congratulations: you don’t need to switch. Secondly, both of these have a steep learning curve, especially to the GUI-oriented desktop generation who have access to alternatives that are much more inviting.
This is for people moving to a text editor from Word.
Re:depends on what you're doing (Score:4, Informative)
Until Win8.1, it was actually possible to install a "native" POSIX environment on NT-family OSes (which for most people means XP and anything since then). It had better performance and was more Unix-y than Cygwin - key differences include support for things like SetUID/SetGID/Sticky bits and case-sensitive file system (required NTFS, and could occasionally confuse Win32 programs if there were two files whose name differed only in case, but it worked), though there were others (like not tacking .EXE on the end of every program name). It was called SUA (Subsystem for Unix Application), and was quite useful for those who needed to run Windows software but wanted a bash shell and compatibility with scripts and software written for *nix (it had a complete GCC-based build toolchain, though you could also use MSVC, and was source-compatible with most portable *nix code).
It's still available, including the "tools and utilities" download that gives you basic shells and the like, but when MS released Win8.1 - which doesn't allow the POSIX subsystem - they also stopped funding the forums and package repo, so even if you can find the package files they're all getting more and more outdated.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with Vim (and Emacs) is that they do not support anything modern, not even ctrl-z/x/c/v.
VIM has the "VIM Easy" mode, which when used on MSWindows would do Ctrl-Z/X/C/V out of box. And even select text when holding Shift and moving around with cursor keys.
Shortcut to VIM Easy is preinstalled. If you complain about it, then you probably never really used the VIM. Or are you complaining about the *NIX "vi"?
For programming Eclipse or NetBeans or Visual Studio is just miles away what of vi/emacs can do, especially out of the box.
The problem for the professionals is not what the IDE can do out of box, but what can it be made to do. Eclipse or NetBeans or Visual Studio - all suck horribly at everything for what there is no button premade. And when there is a button for everything - they suck at finding this right button.
But I'm not planning to contest the point that VIM is not IDE. No, it is not "VIM is bad IDE" - it is "VIM is not IDE". (This is different for Emacs, though: it is an IDE and then some more. One needs to learn it. And lack of good in-depth tutorials is actually what turned me off from the Emacs.)
The thing about VIM is that it integrates nicely with the system, instead of reinventing it. And it also provides great automation facilities with macros, mappings or scripts. They are fairly simple and can be learned in 1-2 weeks, which is a small price to pay for the ability to control 100% of your text editor. That is the capability no other editor offers.
To get vi/emacs to work nearly as good as good IDE is just too big a job.
(Please do not say "vi" when you really mean "VIM".)
In the project Neovim [neovim.org] the work going on to make the Lua the built-in scripting language and improve VIM's plug-in framework. All that to specifically allow to create IDE based the VIM. (Though in my opinion, the direction of the Neovim effort is misguided. They should have went in direction of allowing VIM to be easily embeddable into other applications.)
So in the future, there might be an IDE based on VIM. But not right now.
For example NetBeans ctrl-b (go to declaration). Sure, you can install ctags, configure it, run it, tinker with it, tinker some more, add custom rules, search net, rinse-and-repeat and eventually you'll get something resembling ctrl-b, but not quite the same.
This is probably the most unjustified complain you throw. The tags support in VIM is very good - if you bothered to RTFM. Literally every book and tutorial describe these highly sophisticated and inexplicable 3 steps involved: install the exuberant ctags, put into the .vimrc the line ":set tags=tags;/", and finally run "ctags -R ." in the root of the project.
If you use plugins like YouCompleteMe [github.com], they would do it for you automagically.
In the end, if you can't bother to read the VIM's help (which is by far the best help for a text editor there is out there) then VIM is definitely not for you.