Text Editors H
Just for fun and discovery.
Same as for distros and DE/WM.
Share your own, as an image, or just a written list. :)
Mine:
- Fave: Fin
- First: Kate/Kwrite (KDE3 era (... no logo back then though?))
- Future: Fin
- Honourable Mention: Midnight Commander's mcedit
- Loathed: Copilot Studio
- Current: GNU Emacs
- Longest: GNU Emacs
;) I didn't want to wait and see if @[email protected] would make a text editor one. So I just made my own. :)
78 replies
Just realised... mcedit's more accurately the longest used, at least in terms since first used [maybe ~ unsure], and would (and do) still use. But then, if longest used is counting actual time used... nnnnnnothing comes close to emacs. No other text editor serves also as my irc client, organiser, therapist, games system, rss feed, and potentially oh so much more, like email client, 3D modeler (no, seriously), video editor, data analysis, file management, graph generation, slide-show presentations, astrophysics stuff, drone piloting, publishing preparations, printer operation, 3D printer operation, databases, finance and transaction handling, accounting, audio editing, screensaver, web browser, even potentially replacing my terminal multiplexor and even my window manager.
But I did start using mcedit a clear decade before emacs. ... I probably launched each for the first time, around the same time late 2003 to early 2004, but didn't start using emacs (at all) until 2014, whereas mcedit soon became a fave (especially in the midst of the nano'ites thinking they had won their category of text editor, yet few of them seemed to have even heard of mcedit).
... Ah well, even though it's still legit, if I had thought of it at that time, I could have wrangled mcedit into longest, leaving room for something else as honourable mention. ... Maybe neovim. Maybe leafpad.
Fave: Emacs
First: notepad
Future: Emacs (maybe vim)
Honorable mention: Emacs (orgmode), sed
Loathed: Nano (I can't stand using it any longer after being used to emacs)
Current: Emacs
Longest: Emacs
Not a Dev but I used VScode and codium for a while trying to learn bow to program. Definitely more than it needs to be. Sublime was the longest Since I haven't seen it here yet, honorable mention to Geany. Cool lightweight editor I've used a couple times.
fave, current, longest: neovim first: qbasic ide loathed: anything with ai "features" built in
Nano for privileged editing and Kate for everything else
Fave: vim First: vim Future: vim Honorable mention: vim Loathed: anything other than vim Current: vim Longest: believe it or not, vim
Is that just cause you don't know how to close it?
Fave: vim
First: notepad.exe
Future: vim
Honorable mention: vi
Loathed: Everything but (neo)?vim?
Current: vim
Longest: vim
I'd make my own reply but this person speaks for me.
Nano and kate I edit text, not write configs.
Micro, if I can reasonably get it onto a system, it will stay there. I don't really need anything more to tweak configs
TUI-nano (you vi people are insane. I will die on this hill) GUI-as long as it’s not ms word, I could give a damn
A GUI is nice, but becomes obsolete, once you know the keybindings. I personally disabled all GUI elements of my editor (emacs) because I don't need them anyway.
writing a text editor in a shell language is certainly... a choice. also this kinda feels like an ad for your own project.
anyway i've gone notepad, np++, eclipse, sublime, atom, vim, nvim, back to vim, then vis, then vim again, and now helix, which i'll hopefully stick with a while. worst has gotta be the GMod Wiremod Expression editor. honorable mention to acme.
Don't use fin. It, like all my stuff, is scruffy.
It's just honestly my fave (~ Would be weirder if I were writing it masochistically to not be my fave). Wrote it with intention of using it in the future.
as long as you're having fun and learning. although i don't know if it's dogfooding if you're a one-man band; seems more like just cooking.
had an itch, and when the whim took inspiration, scratched it.
Oh damn, I forgot about acme. Plan 9 is a trip.
It's such a shame np++ doesn't exist on linux 😔
What about Geany?
Another text editor to check out, thanks!
I mentioned it in my own comment but there's a pretty much 1 to 1 clone of Notepad++ on Linux called Notepadqq
Thanks! Will check out!
gedit and kate are better alternatives honestly. and with their security practices i would rather be without.
Interesting, what are their bad security practices?
I have kate but it's way behind notepad++, IMO! Will check out gedit, thanks.
they did their autoupdate through an unencrypted connection, without any verification, and just executed the payload locally. when pressed about it they added https but then it turned out they had no auth on the update server. it was a whole thing, took several years for them to correct and they complained every step.
Ouch!
Favorite: Helix Future: Helix Current: Helix Loathed: Anything with JavaScript, a mandated GUI, or non-modal keybinds First: Vim Longest: Helix Honorable mention: Kakoune
Are you me??
Maybe. Are you a Rust programmer who loathes genAI?
P.S. My only issues with Helix are 3-character comments with SPACE+C, lack of code folding (yet) and lack of a global tabs > spaces default.
No, and a qualified no.
Helix is missing a lot of features I want. Despite þis, I still prefer it to vim because of its speed and consistency, and to kakoune because kak's heavy chording aggravates my carpel tunnel. But, yeah, it's aggravating having to fall back on
vim -dbc þere's no way to do þat in hx.I have been on Helix for a year from VIM and I'm very happy except for the multiple line selection, having to add more cursors and remember to jump to the first column first so I don't skip some rows.
Nano for privileged editing and Kate for everything else
Fave: I don't really do favourites, but I tend to reach for
nanobecause it's usually installed and I prefer it to thevifamily.First: The 8-bit Commodore screen editor was hard to beat for its time, so let's go with that, even though I probably used the BBC Micro arrow / copy system before that.
Future: Heck if I know. I installed
microbut haven't touched it yet. Maybe one day I'll get around to that. Or an IDE. So probablynano.Honourable mention: An editor I worked on for a project once. There's something to be said for editing an editor's source code inside itself.
Loathed:
ed/edlinCurrent: Let's go with
nanoagain, but I do lot more typing on command lines and in browser text boxes, like this one.Longest: If
picocounts as proto-nano, then definitelynano. Been using that since the '90s.Yep. I couldn't remember the names of the text editors I used on those old 4-bit green radiation-gun computers of the 70s-80s... so I just went with first after becoming a windows refugee. What a great blast from the past though, thinking of my early days, with commodores, spectrums, bbc-micros, and whatever that one we had from before that was called. M-mm-mmmm. Joyous nostalgia kick. :)
True that. :)
That's fun! I'm currently comming from Neovim to see if Emacs is for me. I've only really used Neovim for half a year and Emacs for less than a week so who knows? I've actually only been sent on this rollercoaster ride by JetBrains trying to sneak AI training data collection into IntelliJ almost a year ago, eventually being annoyed by how clanky Eclipse is. Am I annoyed by Neovim? No, not at all, I just want to see if I like Emacs even better.
I'm honestly torn between Nvim and Emacs right now. I'm a long time vim user and been on Nvim for 10+ years. The rate at which they change config methods kinda drives me nuts. The change from vimscript to lua, and then a new mixup of lua to another syntax of lua, NEED TO CHANGE THE LUA!!!!!! It's too much. I really did a yearly config rewrite for a while because the plugin ecosystem moves lightning fast. Now most of the time I feel like I'm using a half baked config solution even on a new from scratch setup.
Emacs feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm still working out the kinks but it feels like it just works when I tell it to do something. I'm not using evil mode. I dove head first into vanilla and it's been really nice. ELisp is wild. I have no fucking clue what I'm doing with it, but it all seems to be working. The fact that it took me 3 days to get my Emacs setup to where I am with Nvim and beyond was a great start to the switch. I'm really enjoying Emacs and there's definitely a past version of me going 'What the fuck' right now.
In my experience, which seems to be identical experience of many, including the one who got me into emacs, emacs config re-writes tend happen every decade, rather than every year. Nice and peaceful like that. :)
vim is basically my foreverhome at this point. I feel clumsy trying to use most other things. But I also like emacs shortcuts and learned a bunch of them unwittingly via bash having that mode set out of the box.
Fave is (Doom) Emacs, even though I haven't used it in a while. It was fun and mostly painless to customize it a tad with no prior Lisp experience. Things like Org Mode and Org Babel let me write a short story around my code blocks if I needed one to remember concepts, purposes, etc in a language I was tinkering with. They could execute in-document or I could tangle them to where they belonged. That just seemed brilliant to me. It being essentially an eLisp interpreter at its core, with the editor functionality and everything else built on top, it was neat being able to just pop open an interpreter window or tab and use what I learned for quick calculations or whatever. Previously I'd open a new terminal or tmux pane and use Python for that purpose. And currently mostly Bash and CLI utils over Python.
Pretty sure my first was EDIT.COM on MS-DOS but I would've been a single-digit age at the time and mostly clueless so I say notepad.exe instead. The window in which I used DOS was very short before the family computer started running Win 3.1. Then 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista... every version except 2000 and 8. We had 8 long enough to back up our data and revert to 7
Future, I'll probably keep trucking with nvim.
Honorable mention, gedit. My first GUI editor on Linux desktop before I leaned heavy into CLI applications.
Loathed, VSCode. I'm not a dev so it was just too much. A Vim plugin made it usable for editing, and I liked how easy plugins were to find/install, but I'm not a dev and full IDEs are wasted on me. Same reason I finally stopped trying to turn nvim into one and minimized my plugins for it.
Current is nvim. I like modal editing and its particular keybinds. I like regex search and find/replace. Multiline editing, motions, and macros defined on the fly. I bet I haven't read 2% of the built-in documentation and know it already does more than I'd ever need right out of the box. For the same reason I still often find neat things I didn't know about it and try to commit to memory for my future editing.
Longest is n/vim. That probably won't ever change for the same reasons above.
Fave: micro
First: nano
Future: eMacs? Honorable mention: helix Loathed: vim/neovim Current: micro Longest: micro
I'm a micro fanboy.
How does one come about disliking vim but still finding helix attractive? It is rather similar as far inputs go.
Idk. It was purple and. Aught my attention for a min.
There are dozens of us!
interesting how things turned out today. no one will spend time configuring an editor anymore, and just use a pre-configured, possibly web based, default.
I started with ms dos edit/borland. moved to Linux and emacs/xemacs shortly after (this was when the two editors were split).
got emacs pinky and moved to vim. stayed with vim for 15+ years. finally moved to neovim (because of the Firefox extension firenvim)
I'd say I've spent enough time configuring neovim 😄
(Btw, highly recommend configuring neovim through nixvim if you're already using nix. Incredibly stable. I had to fix one plugin or another all the time with plain nvim. Now, literally never. Plus,
nix run github:<username>/<repo>#nvimon any nix-enabled system, and get dropped into your exact config, keybinds, theme, plugins and all. I've set it up to expose language-enabled variants by appending e.g..goor.pythonto that command.)(Sorry my comments tend to go off-topic)
interesting how things change. i started out downloading scripts from vim.org before the github days. finally after 10years I got fed up and looked for a plugin manager. moved to packer.
a couple of years later, that went dead so I was forced to move again. now I'm on lazy.nvim which works well for me.
nvim decided to ship a default plugin manager. im dreading the day I have to migrate to that... (not cause it's better/worse, but cause migrating is a pain)
Funny, I also went from packer to lazy.nvim, but then hopped off and redid my config in nix. Hadn't actually heard about the default package manager. That seems like a good thing for the ecosystem!
My fave comment. Handy.
Well call me "no one".
(... not to mention having written my own, in fish, since I know fish better than I know elisp (despite using them for around the same length of time), with the goal of it being simple to extend and reconfigure for fish users (like me, wanting a better handle on my text editor reconfiguring and learning how to better use the configuration language.)).
Save you, it can. ;)
Though, then there's also evil-mode, and spacemacs and doomemacs, which I think both have evil-mode on by default.
I'd swapped control and capslock almost immediately and still got emacs pinky. when I found vim, I decided I liked it more than the escape meta alt control shift madness, and quit. the vim script was better than elisp, but not great. neovim lua is better than vim script, but still a little lacking.
i too have thousands of lines in my neovim config... but if I was starting today, the point and click editors are adequate enough that I might not invest the time.
that said, I just added two plugins into my config today 🙃🙃
I'm a typewriter guy.
I love my olivetti Linea90 as a work horse, for leisure typing it is either an olivetti Lettera DL or a Princess 300.
I'm guessing it's a bit difficult to edit config files on it? 🤭
not really, llms have become quite good at extracting text from scans. /s
Because of the missing characters
Fave: Kate
First: GNOME Text Editor
Future: Kate
Honourable Mention: Notepadqq used it for a after when I first switched from Windows where I used Notepad++
Least Liked: Vim
Current: Kate
Most used: Kate
For anything CLI related I use Micro.
What made you switch from Notepadqq to Kate? I'm currently still stuck on my Notepad++ bias too.
I reinstalled my system at somepoint and just decided to used Kate since I didn't have NPQQ installed.
It ended up having everything I needed from NPQQ.
sudo apt install kate it is then!
I've used so many over the years. Sublime was really cool for a bit. Notepad++ and UltraEdit look like ass but they were both daily drivers for a long time. These days I bounce between codium and vim throughout the day. I kinda hate codium/vscode but I use it for the same reason I've used vim for so long: it's functional and available everywhere.
I should really give one of the newer vim clones a closer look one of these days.
for GUI I use sublime and for terminal I use nano
its a peaceful life
First? Notepad
Now?
Kate
Least liked: any that feel the need to advertise themselves on social media
ed is the one, true, standard text editor.
I considered whimsically including ed or butterflies, maybe as honourable mention, or as wish to use in the future. [/xkcd378]
I wish Gnome Builder was better. Why is there not a gtk IDE that can use any lsp? Also why does VS Code have to have such awful UI and UX?
:D Nice additional categories.
My "least liked" is also my "will never use".
Never had any forced on me.
Nano
Immolo? Is that you?
👋
In Linux I use code for coding, and nano for everything else