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."
You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not have been wise for me to spend years training vi into my muscle memory, but it's done now, and I'm not especially interested in giving up that advantage.
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I use GVim all the time. It can "highlight syntax and auto-indent code...spellcheck documents... [and] record macros". I don't see the point of managing code snippets - if you're using the same code multiple places you should take a DRY-er approach. And being an IDE is for Emacs people. ;P
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There are many times where you repeat code and DRY does not apply. Common patterns that apply to different projects, but are mostly just grunt-work typing.
snipMate for Vim adds a nice version of code snippets. For example, I type "#!" in python scripts to add "#!/usr/bin/env python". It's a small single saving, but things like that add up over numerous scripts, and help avoid typos.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Insightful)
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8-10 years ago, I was working on an application that was annoyingly slow, and a profiler showed that 80% of the time was spent in one particular function that was long and repetitive. I rolled up the calculations as tightly as I could, using as little duplicate code as I could, and sped the app up markedly. I roughly halved the amount of time that function took.
Try Sublime in 'vintage' mode. (Score:2)
That's why I use Sublime Text. It has a 'vi' mode that works very well. (Well, it does the most common functions, but if you're a grand-master vi wizard you'll easily find things it doesn't do.)
That was the primary reason I allowed myself to try it. 'come for the 'vi' stay for everything else.' The good news is that it's a top-notch editor even without vi. The 'overview' slider on the right side is brilliant. There's a vibrant 'plugin community', and it's very customizable. Also it's multi-p
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You're not supposed to close the windows. They just stay open all the time. (You don't even have to save them, it just keeps them up 'unsaved' the next time you come back. :w does work though, exactly as you'd expect.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:2)
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I would have gone for "ed" maybe. ;)
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Funny)
I used to teach Linux. (Score:3)
My students hated that I made them learn vi. Why? Because if the graphics subsystem failed, or they had to go to single user mode, they had vi.
If they made it through my class alive, they could use whatever they wanted.
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If the graphics subsystem fails, or I have to go to single-user mode, I have nano.
WordStar rules!
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What the graphic editors miss is the advantage of being able to run in any environment, including lame ssh shell sessions... I think that's what really keeps vi and emacs going.
Personally, I prefer jed, and yes, it's clunky and feature poor, but it's good enough to get the job done and I'm not devoting 12cc of brain volume to remember how to use it.
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!
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Vi has a learning curve that's more of a cliff than a curve, but it's probably the most usable text editor ever invented. People get freaked out by it and give up on trying to learn it, but everything is available without having to remove your hands from the keyboard and it has commands for virtually anything that you're likely to want to do.
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A Pedant Writes: A learning curve is a plot of amount of stuff learnt on the y-axis against time on the x-axis. A steep learning curve means you learn quickly. I avoid using "steep learning curve" which I know in common usage is often taken to mean the opposite of its original meaning and use "slow learning curve", since "slow learning" is less ambiguous, hopefully..
You'll thank me later.
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.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Sublime with vim bindings turned on. It has features I use every day that vi/vim doesn't have, and doesn't get in the way of my vim muscle memory. It also doesn't get in the way of my ed muscle memory, nor my Mac muscle memory. In fact, pretty much whatever legacy text editor my muscle memory thinks I'm using, Sublime will interpret the commands correctly and let me get the job done.
I've used all the listed editors, and eventually settled on the vim/Sublime combo, as they accomplish everything the others do, and then some.
And to think that 20 years ago, I was a diehard emacs user. I liked my macros, but Sublime can do all that too; it just prefers python over LISP.
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Pointing at a forum for the editor is probably not what the person you responded to was looking for when asking their question. Except for the "Beautiful Interface" which somehow translates to "Fun" I don't see anything on the list that VI/VIM can't do already.
I personally don't mind graphical text editors, but when managing thousands of servers I find them impractical. I can ssh -> VI something and move on to the next task. Writing a bunch of code or documentation, I prefer a graphical interface. Eac
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:4, Insightful)
Another often overlooked advantage of vim is continuity. Thos of us who learned vi because it was one of the best editors at the time can still use those skills. When the need arises, we can also build upon those skills with a modern implementation. In all likelihood I'll be able to make the same claim 20 years from now, when most (if not all) of these upstarts will be long forgotten.
New and improved is great. Constantly relearning skills that you already have, to adapt to new interfaces, isn't so hot.
Re: You're welcome to them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that Vim is not a pig. I started using it 3 years ago, not because it's cool, but because many programmers recommended it to me.
I've been a programmer for more than 20 years, and during the past years using Vim I regretted many times that I hadn't take the time to make the switch sooner.
All other editors I tried (but I never tried Emacs) helped me a lot at the beginning, but eventually I would hit a top and stop improving. With Vim I feel like there is no limit to the productivity gains I can achieve. It's user interface is a language and I speak it more fluently every day, and I can extend it with customization.
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.
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The problem with Vim (and Emacs) is that they do not support anything modern, not even ctrl-z/x/c/v.
Yeah we al know vi has esoteric keybindings. You're raising this like it's some fundemental point.
For programming Eclipse or NetBeans or Visual Studio is just miles away what of vi/emacs can do, especially out of the box.
No it can't. vim is so much more than a Java, C++ or C# editor. None of those "miles away" editors provide syntax highlighting for shell, awk, python, etc
To get vi/emacs to work nearly as go
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If you aren't using a modern IDE like eclipse for Java, or VIsual Studio for
It's like pulling an automobile with a rope tied to your balls, impressive, but there are better ways to get the job done.
Where editors like vi and Emacs, in the hands of an expert, still shine is configuration file maintenance, and really file maintenance on any text that isn't compilable source code.
I really wish I knew them better than I do, just for that reason. I c
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It's a matter of functionality, speed of use and the commonality of embedded operations that work the same as in other UN*X tools. Incredibly powerful. Would pay to have vi on systems that don't have it.
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My preference is to use Notepad++ on Windows for everything, even when I have Visual studio, because it loads fast. If I'm going to compile things locally then I use Visual Studio.
On *nix OS's I use Midnight Commander editor (mcedit) if it's available, nano or pico if it's not, and only resort to vi when the system is obnoxious about using it (like editing crontab or passwd files, which BTW I do with MC anyway despite the archaic warnings.) MC has syntax highlighting and all the minimal BS I want to put up
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Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Funny)
Okay okay I'll get off your lawn!
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Re:Pfft (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nano isn't bad, I like jed a little better - not quite as lame, and almost as universally available.
If you're doing serious code composition, then, yes, use a well honed tool for the job that has helpful auto-complete, highlighting, etc. But if you're hacking through twisted network links - X usually isn't available and something lighter weight is a very good to be able to use.
Personally, I only "hack the net" about 1% of the time, so I don't think it's worth using a text based editor as my primary tool, b
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, I'm surprised by the summary. Apparently the author has not actually used emacs or vim, and instead listed the BARE MINIMUM set of features that any editor should support. Maybe the author came with a pre-existing bias against emacs and vi as "tools for old farts" and assumed any new tools must automatically be better.
What's there to compare? (Score:5, Funny)
none of which are named Emacs or Vim
What's there to compare? Everything else is just Notepad.
Re: What's there to compare? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What's there to compare? (Score:2)
vi CAN run in the browser, or plugin lynx (Score:2)
There are assorted plugins to integrate vim and other vi-like editors with web browsers. So I might be using vim keystrokes to write this. Alternatively, a vim plugin can also call lynx. I'm not sure why you'd want to do the latter. The former might be handy if just avoid accidentally ending your posts like this. :wq
Re:What's there to compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
But Notepad(++) is pretty good...
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Re:What's there to compare? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually tried to read the text but it was too brain-numbingly stupid to get through. He's trumpeting all these wonderful features that... vi and emacs had in the 80s.
It's so true - 'those who do not remember Unix are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.'
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So they did a text-editor roundup that excluded every serious contender in favor of 5 third-string also-rans. I actually tried to read the text but it was too brain-numbingly stupid to get through. He's trumpeting all these wonderful features that... vi and emacs had in the 80s. It's so true - 'those who do not remember Unix are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.'
Lennart Pottering needs to read the last line of this comment in particular!
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Ed, man! [gnu.org]
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Is the "noob" the guy with the ID 718245, or 726776? I can't tell. They're both, like, twice as old as me. Or something.
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Half as young?
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vi aka vi
I predate emacs (esc alt meta key) and it is on all unix systems. emacs is still spotty and sometimes you need to install it--vi is always there.
mqh
Not true -- I've been in many situations where 'which vi' has returned nothing.
Now ed is always there -- any environment that doesn't contain ed is not worth being in. It's been the default since 1971, unlike newcomers such as vi that didn't show up until 1976.
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Notepad++ is my favorite, but windows only. It just has all the most important features. Since I'm not on Windows much anymore, I've had to move on... Atom is pretty decent on the Mac (ignoring how huge it is), Gedit is increasingly indecent and unstable, but it's close to Notepad++ in features.
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)
What the fuck happened to gedit's UI? (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to use gedit on Linux a lot a few years ago. I then used OS X for a few years, but I recently moved back to Linux. One of the first things I did after getting Linux installed was try to edit some files using gedit. And my first reaction was: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHAT IN THE FUCKING HELL DID THEY DO TO GEDIT'S UI?!
It used to have a good, traditional UI. There were useful menus and a toolbar, and it all worked very well. But now, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, it looks stupid as all hell. There are no menus any longer, and the toolbar has been castrated into having like 4 buttons. The icons are pathetic, and don't indicate what the button actually does. Whoever the hell reworked the UI managed to break what was once a very usable text editor. Now it's rubbish.
It's like they took the idiotic UI design of Chrome and brought it over to gedit. And now gedit is useless to me! So I've moved on to Kate. At least the KDE crew hasn't gone completely fucking stupid like the GNOME dipshits apparently have.
Why the fuck did they have to ruin gedit's UI?
Re: What the fuck happened to gedit's UI? (Score:3)
As someone who actually likes GNOME Shell, I have to agree. The new-style GNOME apps are horrible. Over simplified, too much white space.
In particular the whole "move dialogue buttons to the window title bar" thing is jarring.
I just use Shell and ignore as much of the rest of GNOME as I can.
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Buttons and menus confuse users.
Or something.
Did they ever fix the god-awful nonsense where Gedit refuses to open a file because it thinks it's some wacko Unicode crap and doesn't even give you an 'I don't freaking care, just open the goddamn file as ASCII' option?
Geany (Score:4, Informative)
Where's geany? It's much better than gedit.
Re:Geany (Score:5, Informative)
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Vote here for geany also...
In my recent switch from Windows to Centos for my desktop/development computer I was missing an editor on par with notepad++. Found geany and I haven't looked back. Excellent all around.
depends on what you're doing (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but if you're a programmer who does lots of editing on a few machines, then pick the editor that best fits the job.
However, as an admin, I have long ago standardized on VI for the simple reason that it's included by default on every single *nix variant out there. (At least, in my experience.)
My cunning strategy breaks down with Windows, though. Notepad is so nasty to use that I find myself installing textpad or cygwin on the machines where I do most of my work.
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You might find it useful to stick the portable version of ConTEXT on a USB drive:
http://www.contexteditor.org/i... [contexteditor.org]
It hasn't been developed for 6 years, but I still have it installed just for its ability to open text files of several hundred megabytes in seconds. It's great as a lightweight editor for Windows.
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My cunning strategy breaks down with Windows, though. Notepad is so nasty to use that I find myself installing textpad or cygwin on the machines where I do most of my work.
One option here is to run a portable [portableapps.com] editor -- emacs also works in this mode -- from a shared drive or usb stick. You can try them all and if you don't like any of them, just delete the directory -- no uninstallation, system files, or registry settings to worry about.
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However, as an admin, I have long ago standardized on VI for the simple reason that it's included by default on every single *nix variant out there. (At least, in my experience.)
FWIW, vi(1) is actually part of the POSIX specification. So you're guaranteed at least the base level of functionality (which is generally all you need to tweak /etc/hosts, etc.).
For heavier coding jobs something else can be useful, but for the basics: getting in, moving around, editing, and saving/quitting, are what you need to know. Anything after that is gravy.
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However, as an admin, I have long ago standardized on VI for the simple reason that it's included by default on every single *nix variant out there. (At least, in my experience.)
While true, in my experience there is no reason why nano could not be included (and should be).
Re:depends on what you're doing (Score:4, Insightful)
You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.
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You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.
You have a point. I wrote a menu system in Windows Shell once, just for the experience. Had a headache for days afterwards. That is one twisted language. I've heard about powershell, but never bothered with it. If you're going to do any reasonable amount of scripting, cygwin is invaluable.
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Not just scripting, but I can't imagine how to do any development work without grep or find. I even pull open the shell to do basic stuff when I use windows for games (ie, finding and editing the config files).
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.
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And gvim is much lighter weight than a full cygwin solution. Good suggestion.
Ed man! !man ed (Score:5, Funny)
( obligatory, credit to: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/... [gnu.org] )
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) Unix Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
“Ed is the standard text editor.”
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
“Ed is the standard text editor.”
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
“Ed is the standard text editor.”
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their “edlin” on a Unix standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED “VISUAL” EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
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Ha ha, but seriously all Programmers should know some basic ed.
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lol! and how the hell is this flamebait?
Please tell me I'm wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
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“Ed is the standard text editor.”
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
text editors (Score:2)
i would like some text editors reviews as well, like nano, joe and others
My Personal Favorite (Score:2)
My personal favorite is 'le' simply because its the only one I've found that doesn't obsess over whitespace. It isn't that way by default, you have to configure it from its 'exact' mode which is like most editors into 'text' mode, but at least it has the option unlike most editors. When in 'text' mode, when you push the right arrow while at the end of a line, the cursor just continues to go to the right, and doesn't do anything retarded like go down to the beginning of the next line.
Honestly, why nearly e
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Areyouserious?Whatlanguagesdoyouwritecodein,whichacceptthat?
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..
When I'm editing on one of our Linux servers (Score:2)
I'm generally using BBedit from my Mac. SFTP is my friend.
Besides, who wants all the extra kruft that goes along with Gedit or Kate on a server? In that case it's not the editor I'm objecting to - it's the 100 other required packages that go along with it.
Steep learning curve (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right, dat steep learning curve. I've wasted years using UltraEdit, because I was told that vim was too hard. One friday afternoon I fired up vimtutor, and it took me the following weekend to learn vim enough to do my work as good as with UltraEdit. From that moment on, I've spent years honing my vim skills, following a very slow but rewarding learning curve.
I've been editing (plain)text for living for the last 15 years, and I doubt I'd ever get as dedicated, thorough and precise in my work without vim. All those self-proclaimed no-learning-curve, get-the-job-done editors are inferior, and one should use them only if they actually need to do some ad-hoc work, which they actually don't even want to do.
Pick a proper tool for your job, not a toy.
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In school we were given a one page sheet with vi cheat notes the very first day class started, and that was all the instruction we had, and we started using it that first day. No one had a mouse yet so no one could complain about the lack of point-and-click editing and so it was naturally assumed there would be some learning involved.
Vim makes it so much easier now as it actually comes with help built in.
But EMACS has butterfly mode... (Score:5, Funny)
nedit (Score:2)
I still use nedit [nedit.org], thought it hasn't had any decent upgrade in years. Nonmodal (modal is why I don't like vi/vim), simple, easy to hack regex based syntax highlighting (though that can be tripped up sometimes - I'm looking at you Perl), simple enough to get out of your way (I'm looking at you emacs), and fast with no lag (I'm looking at you jEdit).
Cowards! (Score:2)
Mayank Sharma of Linux Voices tests and compares five text editors for Linux, none of which are named Emacs or Vim.
Real men don their asbestos suit and compare the most useful and popular text editors as well. What's next, are we replacing car analogies with analogies to tunnel boring machines (so that we can compare something no one knows to something else no one knows)?
Jed (Score:2)
Where's Jed? Why isn't anyone mentioning Jed? It's got Emacs bindings, it's really light-weight, works on command-line, and is available by a simple apt-get.
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Who else makes this mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a few text files on my Windows box with :wq scattered around in random locations.
jEdit Should Have Ranked Better (Score:2)
Seems like they knocked it because of the Java and it wasn't Fedora/RPM friendly. But I've been through all of these and the plugin capabilities put jEdit on top IMO. With a little customization, it easier becomes the most powerful of the lot. The other editors are just Notepad clones by comparison.
Joe's Own Editor (Score:2)
As a kid I grew up on Wordstar (running on CP/M, on an Osborne 1) and as such joe (http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/), which is more or less a command-compatible workalike to Wordstar, suits me perfectly. While it is still available and updated reasonably regularly, it is getting harder to find / install easily for modern *nix systems. I love joe, though, I don't even have to think to use it.
Without Joe, I would have failed Linux (Score:3)
Or taken a lot longer to sort it out and then move on to FreeBSD.
Joe seems very intuitive to me and has just enough power as a text editor to give you free range of config files and basic scripting or even a couple hundred lines of Perl. I've always found vi impossible; the command/editing modes never made sense yet Joe seemed to work "like normal."
I made an honest effort to master emacs, but it always seemed like effort and I always went back to Joe when I needed to get something done.
I actually went trol
All you need is Vim (Score:2)
TECO! (Score:2)
pff no one mentions teh grand daddy - TECO
where line noise is an executable!
The bottom line (Score:2)
So, - here's the bottom line. Almost nobody here agrees with the OP premise :-)
Vim and Emacs (Score:3)
Personally I use vim and emacs, they can do everything those editors can, and much more.
Once you get over the learning curve, which I did, there is no reason to try the less capable editors.
There are only 4 editors (Score:4, Insightful)
There is emacs. There is vi, for when some fool didn't install emacs. There is ex, for when the terminal is messed up. And there is ed, because it is the standard text editor.
Anything else is either redundant, or is a word processor with a text-only output.
Re:There are only 4 editors (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh. Emacs is an operating system with text editing facilities.
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: (Score:2)
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No, you can teach us old Unix guys new tricks. Vim is a totally acceptable acceptable upgrade to vi. Just like bash is an acceptable upgrade to sh. And perl is definitely better than awk/sed.
We do draw the line at gvim though. And I've heard rumours of a new C like language that is object oriented... haven't tried it though.
Re: (Score:3)
And perl is definitely better than awk/sed.
No. People learn perl then think they can program. It just goes wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
dd of=/dev/hd1a seek=1172 conv=sparse
Re: (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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How many GUIs at once? One reason I never liked any IDE is that they're locked into this broken format of displaying only one code window at a time. Some IDEs won't you open more than one instance (or that may be due to windows being stupid).
I know some people who have a big full screen of just Mac terminal, but subdivided into 10 different text windows, some with shell and some with editors. Others tile their different text editor windows to make use of all the real estate.
And you can use a gui with ema
maybe nobody prioritizes lightweight and Emacs (Score:2)
Emacs bindings and light weight, eh? Maybe nobody who cares about light weight is accustomed to emacs and vice versa.