Category: Best Open Source Text Editor

Nobody loves a good old fashioned vi/emacs war more than me, so we decided to create a category in the Slashdot 2000 Beanies just as an excuse to have a flamewar! Nominate your favorite text editor, and let the good times roll.

Comments

Re:Keith Bostic, nvi

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Keith's work on nvi is amazing. He had to start with elvis, egads! He got undo right (which vim didn't), and his comments in the code about modelines are wonderful:

/* O_MODELINE 4BSD
* !!!
* This has been documented in historical sy stems as both "modeline"
* and as "modelines". Regardless of the name, this option represents
* a security problem of mammoth proportions , not to mention a stunning
* example of what your intro CS professor r eferred to as the perils of
* mixing code and data. Don't ad d it, or I will kill you.
*/

Don't forget that Keith gave us Berkeley DB, too.

viper is the way

[Anonymous Coward]

My choice is emacs with the viper vi-emulation. Allows me to use all of the spiffy functions of emacs, while being able to do quick editing as of vi. Also, if emacs seems to be too bloated, switch to editing server mode to get quick startups.

gvim obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

gvim! if you havent tried it lately you should.

Re:.

[Anonymous Coward]

what part of "open source" do you not understand?

Re:Ahhh... you need "pico -w"

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Ed is the standard text editor.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs 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 Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!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!!! ?

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[Anonymous Coward]

You certainly don't deserve your 2 status with that kind of crap, Peter.

I nominate Notepad!

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep on trollin' in the free world.

Re:BBedit!

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally find the only reason I keep my mac around is BBEdit. Too bad I cant hack on it.

Re:Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

> VI's killed -9 because no-one knew they had to press ESC q! ENTER *Sigh* Knew it was an EMACS user before the btw... It's ESC :q! ENTER, or ESC ZZ, or ESC :x ENTER if you care for your work. B-)

Re:Nedit: Not too stable for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Lesstif .89.4 has been out for less than a month, so I don't think it would even be on the Red Hat 6.1 CD. NEdit doesn't require any special installation, it's a completely self-contained executable. You can get it pre-built for Linux from http://nedit.org.

Re:Problems with pico

[Anonymous Coward]

Pico has search and replace...

pico -b, then Ctrl-W, Ctrl-R

JOE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, elegant, powerful. Joe is the favorite editor of many Linuxers.
I fell in love with JOE from the day of my first slackware install.
I sort of knew Vi from my SLS days, but it was too annoying for me, and my 386 didn't have enough ummph to run emacs well.
Then.. On the day of my first slackware install, a glorious type-o of 'ls' brought me into Joe, and my life was never the same since.

Re:JOE!

[JumpSuit Boy]

joe a dumb term is such beautiful site. I need no colors. Just think of all the cruff that would have to be added ta add support for this language or that language. O'well

Re:JOE!

[Isomer]

I agree, Joe has simple key bindings that are
common enough that (if only in the doze/dos world)
most people don't have to relearn them. It's
powerful enough for programming purposes, yet it
doesn't masquarade as an entire operating system
like some editors. It's small, fast, simple,
and powerful enough for almost all tasks. What more
can you ask for in an editor?

Re:JOE!

[Isomer]

Well yes, color syntax highlighting, but I
think that that tends to be bloatware anyway,
^G tells me if brackets match and the rest tends
to be eye candy. Syntax highlighting has it's
place, it is very useful at times, but it's not
something I need continously. I use emacs when
things just start to get too hairy, but thats
maybe 1ce a year. Joe is lean, simple and usable,
and I there is nothing I can point to and say:
"I'd really like to change...."

Re:JOE!

[ismo_s]

since the first time i used *nix i felt in love with joe. and joe is something i'm using still, everyday, in different tasks. forget emacs and vi ;)

Re:JOE!

[mattdm]

if only it did color syntax highlighting. *sigh*

--

Re:JOE!

[toastyman]

Joe is also by far my favorite. Features like intelligent paragraph formatting (preserving "> >" at the beginning of lines), being able to handle all sorts of unprintable characters, huge files, histories on text prompts, and it includes 'jmacs', 'jstar' and 'jpico'. It also has 'rjoe' for restricted environments.

Yes, it's WordStarish, but it's easy to learn, and very configurable.

"vi has two modes. One in which it beeps, and one in which it doesn't."

kwrite

[Anonymous Coward]

I have loved emacs since i learned how to use it some decades ago. But kwrite is easier to use and does what an editor should. I nominate kwrite

Re:kwrite

[_Gnubie_]

I'd have to say Kwite too. Infact I do most of my coding now in Kwrite (The rest in Kdevelop which embeds kwrite I believe).

Its small fast, does syntax highlighting for nearly everything and is extremely easy to use. The "open recent" feature is really handy. It has everything I need in a code editor.

Kudos to Jochen Wilhelmy (digisnap@cs.tu-berlin.de) for this lovely little editor!

Emacs better for Dvorak

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Emacs's pseudo-mnemonic keyboard shortcuts easier to use in Dvorak than some of vi's positionally dependent keys. Home row, anyone?

And another thing: I've lost count of the number of times I've munged a vi session because of the CAPS LOCK key.

Re:Emacs better for Dvorak

[volsung]

That's interesting. I use a Dvorak layout, but since I never use vi, I never noticed the problem you describe. I suppose it's good that I happened to learn emacs then.

[ Note to vi supporters: I'm not so biased that I won't learn vi eventually. I just don't think it will become my editor of choice. Besides, the text editor flame war is always a good hoot. :) ]

Too _bad_ it uses Motif?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank goodness it uses Motif. Nedit is the best editor around. If it used one of these other crappy toolkits it would be useless. It integrates with the industry standard Unix desktop, with full drag and drop and cut and paste _THANKS_ to Motif. It looks really nice, clean and professional.

I agree with you that nedit is the best editor around. But come on! Motif is the best toolkit around. I am not talking about licensing. I'm talking about practicality. Because we all have to get the job done.

Re:Too _bad_ it uses Motif?!?

[Lightstorm]

Hmmm, I'd rather it didn't use Motif myself. For one thing, Motif isn't free so you have to consume memory with statically linked libraries or use Lesstif instead.

What about Qt? Motif looks positively old fashioned next to Qt. I'd also love to see the extra level of key binding translation used by Motif be removed from nedit (osfPageUp etc).

Nedit is a great editor though, that would be my choice too.

-- Lightstorm.

Re:cat -- the perfect editor for Java ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, `cat' is the perfect editor for Java :

Write once, run everywhere!

MCEdit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great, it uses pull-down menus, does colorized syntax highlighting, spell checks and more.

NTemacs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote for emacs, but for a particular port: NTemacs! This combines all of the brilliant features of text-mode emacs with colors, a nice usable interface and the ability to use the best coding font I know of (Fixedsys). But really, all versions of emacs (save Xemacs, ugh) are quite good. If all you do is edit config files, feel free to use pico -- but if you've ever had to write lots and lots of code, *nothing* beats emacs, period. Emacs is about the only program (maybe apache and bash count too) which does its job so well that I've never, ever wanted to write a replacement to do it "my way". For some quantitative comparison, does your favorite editor do: - transparently load/save files/browse dirs via ftp - keyboard macros - smart syntax highlighting, (correct) auto indenting and folding -- for *lots* of important languages (not just C and html?) - editing binary files - comes with built-in tetris? - easy to find/write user-developed modes for obscure languages? - shares keys with bash and GNU readline lib? (vi counts here) Only reasonable downside of emacs: - loads slowly (3/4 second, maybe) on slower machines - default keys are unfamiliar to windows users (then again, emacs came way way before windows, and the keys actually do make sense once you learn them -- and you can always use the windows keys emulation package!) That's it! All other important editors can be emulated inside emacs! - Tom 7

oops

[Anonymous Coward]

On another note, I might add that this little form edit box is probably the *worst* editor I've used. ;) Should've clicked 'preview'!

Re:Editors - vim or vi there is no subsitute

[Anonymous Coward]

...Such as?

Editors suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors are for wussies. Cat and ^D are all real men need. They are the fastest, lightest and most portable editors yet.

Re:Editors suck

[ixjzv]

you can also use "dd of=/dev/hda1 ..." or even magnets :)

but personally, I like xfte and code crusader. I also like the DOS edit.com

It should be vim

[Anonymous Coward]

I use vim at linux, NT, and SCO. I keep vim for windows with me in floppies with my fsf CD. I used to like vi before I used linux, but not I am addict of vim. It's widowing, making macroes, syntax highlighting is perfect.

gEdit

[Anonymous Coward]

gEdit is the best. It has good copy and paste, and cna have multiple docs open in a window. It uses very little system resources as well.

Re:gEdit

[xXRyanDGXx]

Sure it's better than notepad in windows! But thats not saying anything. Gnome is cool but the functionality of Emacs and JED kick the crap out of gedit. I used to use it for schoolwork:)

.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of any text editor that has gotten the job done faster than notepad under windows nt.

Re:.

[Audin]

Just don't try to edit anything over 64K...

If you're stuck in windows, PFE is probably the way to go. Unless you've installed Emacs, of course.

Re:.

[Joheines]

And that's not the only brain dead restriction:

- You don't see any line numbers.
- You can't search & replace
- There is no hot key for searching, you
always have to go over the menus.
- It can't handle unix mode (LF only) files.
- TABs are always 8 bytes wide.

I can understand if someone wants to express
his l33tness by listing notepad as the favorite
editor, but I don't think anyone actually
uses it for bigger projects cause it's a pain
in the ass.

Emacs runs quite nicely on Windows (although
it seems to have some problems with accessing
files from the network neighbourhood), XEmacs
is unstable as hell on Win32.

one more vote for jed :)

[Anonymous Coward]

see topic :)

perl

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite text editor is Perl. Think of all the times you've used perl to edit textfiles. 'Nuff said.

How to remember how to quit VI.

[Anonymous Coward]

ESC = Escape this
: = colon thing (everyone knows what a colon also could be, right?)
q = quit and do
! = NOT
RETURN = return.


Instead use ED, the only editor with a easy to learn user interface. You only need to learn the ? character.

cat

[Anonymous Coward]

I love this quote:

"It always amazed me that Bill's favorite editor is the UNIX cat command."

James Gosling on Bill Joy
http://java.sun.com/j avaone/keynotes/transcripts/schmidt.html

vim

[Anonymous Coward]

The vim editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

Re:vim

[mccrew]

Vim. How can anybody say otherwise with a straight face?

All the programmers functionality in a tight package, and compatible with vi.

If you only want to learn an editor once, vim is the way to go.

----
Wind and temp at my house

vim!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Off course, vim is _the_ text editor to use! fast, cool and easy...

Re:vi: not just useful, but fun to watch

[pez]

Indent a region? Vi users are an easy-to-plesae bunch, aren't they?

To indent an entire file that's compressed and sitting on a machine in the other hemisphere:

C-x C-f /user@host:path/to/file.c.gz RET emacs fetches, gunzipps and colorizes your source
C-x h select the entire contents of the file
C-M-\ indent the file (M-x indent-region if you prefer)
C-x C-s save the file

...how can you call vi a programmer's editor if you can't program it?

-Pez

vi, what else?

[Geek of the Week]

It can be naught but vi, the true editor

Re:vi, what else?

[aminal]

>It can be naught but vi, the true editor ed is the true editor, not that i'd use it. --

Re:vim !

[algae]

vim does indeed rule! I like the syntax highlighting, automatic C style indenting that recognises the beginning and end of {}s, and so forth. Now if only someone would port perl-style regexps to it.

--Alex

staroffice huray! - but it's not open source

[Reinout]

Staroffice works really nice for me. The whole student club I attend will enjoy 50 pages of staroffice-made official statutes for the next 10 years. Also I use the spreadsheet quite often in my study.

But: it's not open source, so it doesn't qualify. But still, I use it till better stuff arives (kde office keeps sounding wonderful!)

greetings,

Reinout

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

[Reinout]

Bring out your dead!

• old beaten horses
• VI's killed -9 because no-one knew they had to press ESC q! ENTER
• those who died of fright seeing emacs' sytax

Bring out your dead!

greetings,

Reinout

btw: i use emacs :-)

Re:Statistics

[bcboy]

this understates it just a bit, if disk space is an issue. emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist -- nearly as big as X. Here are some stats from redhat rpms:

bcboy-linux 238 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c `rpm -qa | grep XFree | perl -ne 'chop; print "$_.i386.rpm\n"'`

906 XFree86-Xnest-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
317 XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1294 XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1108 XFree86-Xvfb-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
851 XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
237 XFree86-xfs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
7087 XFree86-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1255 XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1084 XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1917 XFree86-devel-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
16056 total
bcboy-linux 239 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c emac*
6250 emacs-20.3-15.i386.rpm
1021 emacs-X11-20.3-15.i386.rpm
5700 emacs-el-20.3-15.i386.rpm
1386 emacs-leim-20.3-15.i386.rpm
914 emacs-nox-20.3-15.i386.rpm
15271 total
bcboy-linux 240 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c vim*
689 vim-X11-5.3-7.i386.rpm
1382 vim-common-5.3-7.i386.rpm
641 vim-enhanced-5.3-7.i386.rpm
249 vim-minimal-5.3-7.i386.rpm
2961 total


... on small systems, emacs is the first thing to go.

There's also the issue that you have to know vi, anyway, if you do much system work: fitting emacs on a recovery disk is not fun. vim gives you advanced features w/o having to use a completely different editor during system recovery, or on space constrained systems.

URL..?

[Coolio]

Do you have a URL for that? I'm always keen to test pilot new Emacsen.

Re:Everyone will say vi or emacs...

[paul.dunne]

Ed: The Standard Text Editor.

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[nerpdawg]

Main Entry: maculation
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
1 archaic : the state of being spotted
2 a : a blemish in the form of a discrete spot
b : the arrangement of spots and markings on an animal or plant

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[nerpdawg]

It's not just the speed.. vi follows the 'Do one thing and do it well' philosophy of unix more truly than emacs. vi is a fantastic text editor.. able to conquer large codebases in a fraction of a second. emacs does damned near everything except sort socks. In fact, I'm probably wrong about that. There's probably some lisp code out there that enables emacs to sort socks. My bad.

nano

[astyanax]

Yup, again I'm nominating my own project, not for the sake of nominating it but so I can get the word out about it and get help/patches =-)

nano - nano's another editor, a GPLed pico clone with a few enhancements.

Editors - vim or vi there is no subsitute

[ACK!!]

If you take the half second to be a hard core nerd and learn vi you can do things in seconds that it takes Emacs 10 minutes to do after coding in LISP.

Another full hearted vote for JED! :)

[DP]

I don't think I could live without this editor, and my rc file for it. It does everything, is tiny, and extremely configurable.

Everyone will say vi or emacs...

[redhog]

...so I'l vote for ed. The One True Editor.

/Do a s/(emacs)|(vi)/ed/ on the rest of the discussion, and you do the world a favor :)

vim for me

[willow]

Probably because I learned vi cold when I first started programming. I like vim because it's relatively small, has a GUI version, and runs on winbloze. The ctags support, syntax coloring, help system, and mouse support meet my needs very well. Every time I've noticed that I'm in "the zone" while editing source code I'm using vi or vim.

I have used emacs (short for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift) quite a bit but 1) it's modelessness got in the way, at least for me, and 2). it's a kitchen sink editor/email/news/browser/... application and I prefer my applications to be focused on one thing. I know lots of people love emacs and that's AOK with me.

The bottom line is you use what works for you. For me it's vim.

mkg

vim all the way you peasants!

[guacamole]

M-x emacs-sucks

Re:Emacs, obviously

[eMBee]

naaa, enter the command as i wrote, and type away.
every time you hit enter, you'll get the translation.

oh, to catch capitals you need of course:tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

greetings, eMBee
--
--

Re:Emacs, obviously

[eMBee]

try
tr a-z n-za-m

greetings, martin.
--

vi: not just useful, but fun to watch

[Teach]

It's funny. From time to time one of my students will wander by after school and catch me coding something full-screen in vi, with syntax highlighting. Many of my upper-level students who watch for a minute or two will usually cry out:

Student: Hey! How'd you do that?
Me: (puzzled) What?
Student: Those ten lines just changed indentation level all at once! And you didn't even move!
Me: Yeah, that's vi for you.
Student: vi can do that?
Me: vi can do anything, once you learn how.

You know a text editor is good when people walking by will actually stop to watch you use it. Tom Christiansen was right, vi isn't just an editor, it's a game (a "rogue-variant", to quote him more accurately).

And while I'm at it, another thing I like about vi is that I can have it installed on every machine I own and it looks just the same everywhere. Consistency is good, IMO.

Efuns: an Emacs-like editor in Objective Caml

[cjeris]

I humbly suggest Efuns, which is an editor based on the design philosophy of Emacs, but rewritten from the ground up in Objective Caml (with some C in the necessary places). Yes, you can use advanced, powerful, type-safe "academic" programming languages to write Real Programs! And the Ocaml group at INRIA recently placed all of the Ocaml system under Open Source licenses -- LGPL for the runtime, QPL for the rest of it. Efuns is available here.

joe...

[dermond]

yes..joe is nice. i use it for any edition under linux for 4 years now.. wordstar compatible keyboard layout (even thought it can emulate pico (jpico or emacs jmacs). it is small fast reliable and has good formating rules when edition emails (line breaking in > > > quoted paragraphs etc etc..) no color no syntax highlighting thought..

mond.

Re:Statistics

[Trane]

I have been using vim for a little more than a year now and find it to be much better than emacs. Sure, you can tweak emacs, but you can also tweak vim. Most of the vim commands are single keys whereas emacs requires key combos to do much of anything. At work this summer I found vim to be essential for making changes to large sections of code. It is easy to develop macros to speed things up in vim. I believe that vim and emacs are relatively equal in abilities but vim is so much faster and simpler. Sure it has a learning curve but if you try to use it you will find it to become natural quite quickly. Also, I find the configuration to be easier. I stoped using emacs because I couldn't figure out how to make it stop autoformatting my C code. I think the default emacs formatting is messy. Emacs also tried its hardest to prevent me from commenting my assembly code. When I would type a semicolon emacs would automatically move to the beginning of the line and comment out the code. This was a major pain. vim has made my life easy. - enarT

Problems with pico

[p3d0]

Pico is nice for email because of word-wrapping and smart ">>" handling, but it doesn't beat vim IMHO because it has:

• No syntax highlighting
• No keyboard macros
• Cumbersome cursor movement
  • No skip word, sentence, etc.
  • No find matching brakets
  • No jump to line number
• No tab size adjustment
• No integration with "make" or "man"
• No search & replace

--
Patrick Doyle

Gutenberg Printing Press!!

[GoofyBoy]

No wacked commands to remember.

Can handle any latin based text.

Any strong man can operate.

All these other wanna-be's don't hold a candle to it!!

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[RenaissanceBug]

Well...there's ease of use for newbies.

I love vim/vi (don't get me wrong), but I think that "ease of use for newbies" isn't a feature I'd attribute to either vi or emacs. When I want to recommend an editor for someone who's not a heavy UNIXer, I'd more likely recommend something along the lines of Pico -- something that has a smaller command-set and a design that meshes better with the "word processor" mental model that most people have been trained to carry around.

For expert users, emacs and vi are two great tools; as soon as I was comfortable with a modest number of commands in vi I began to see the limitations of Pico, Notepad, and other typically word-processorish programs (which I'd never want to use for wading through code--or through anything else, by now!). Both offer good ways of remembering commands (vi mnemonics, emacs command-names and bindings (sorry, I wish I knew enough Emacs to offer better examples)), and both are customizable enough that you can easily get at all the commands you use most often. For me the deciding factors were the speed of vi and the efficiency of its mnemonics.

(okay, my one semi-OT gripe (I'm sure the Emacs folk could see this one coming): lispmode kinda sucks. Any Vimmers out there got a suggestion on how I can customize things to improve it?)

I concur

[CentrX]

Pico is good :) simple :)

Chris Hagar

Re:Emacs, obviously

[Field Marshall Stack]

Jnvg n frpbaq, ner lbh frevbhfyl gryyvat zr gung V'z gur bayl crefba ba /. jub pna fvtug-ernq ebg-13?
--
"HORSE."

The one, the only...

[Field Marshall Stack]

...Ed! Ed! is the standard text editor! Ed, man! !man ed
--
"HORSE."

Jed! Jed! Jed!

[sparty]

Jed, the programmer's editor, is the best open-source editor. Why?

• No ESC key needed.
• Help and menus available if you forget your key bindings
• Key bindings are configurable.
• Reasonable size and footprint (i.e. it fits in one package instead of a disk series, *cough*emacs*cough)
• Good syntax highlighting
• Available for both Linux, DOS, and Win32 (though I've had some problems under Win2k)--this is vital for those of us that work in MS-based places. One of my biggest gripes about the Win32 OS line is the lack of a good text editor anywhere. edit.com comes pretty close, but it isn't graphical and copy-and-paste gets weird (though the latter can also be a problem with the DOS version of Jed in a DOS box, the Windows version works pretty well).

In case you missed the link above, the homepage is at http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed.html.

Re:NEdit. Oh an I miss BBEdit.

[moshez]

Oh, come on, pleeeeese!!!!

Outdated modes? What exactly outdated the
command/command-line/text mode? Alt and Ctrl
were *always* available. On the contrary, now
that computers are much faster then humans, having an editor which is fast to use (never move the fingers away from the keyboard) is a much, much bigger advantage.

BTW:
You do know you don't need Motif for NEdit? Lesstif would do quite nicely, thank you very much.

Re:FTE! - got screenshots?

[eAndroid]

wanna post some screenshots?

BBedit!

[eAndroid]

SO what if it isn't open sourced? It is the best by far, from everythign I've used. Are there any real equivilents that ARE opensourced? I've been looking for a while! I currently use a linux server with appletalk and appleshare IP running and use bbedit to edit my linux files. That's all I use the mac for!

Until I find another editor that shows my perl code's functions in a drop down, I can't switch!

Re:BBedit!

[f2ked]

XEmacs can show your perl code functions in a drop down as well as in a separate buffer!
So switch alread :] : http://www.xemacs.org

That is, XEmacs

[eeyore]

If you're going to get an editor that has everything including the Kitchen Sink in it, why not go for the luxury version with gold-plated taps & plug-chain, and which is built from solid marble?

Nothing exceeds like excess!

Re:Emacs is the one true text editor

[T-Punkt]

Well, I do email-stuff with mutt, browse the
web with my web browser, use the zshell as interactive shell, tetris to play tetris, *VIM* to edit texts (vi, if vim is not installed)... the list goes on and on.

In other words: For every job I use the best
tools available and not a single mediocre tool for every job. Do you see Formula-one mechanics changing wheels with swiss-army knife like "one-for-everything" tools?

jove

[Brett Glass]

This "unsung hero" of editors has just the right combination of features for the busy UNIX system administrator. All of the keystrokes of the original EMACS, a non-modal and easy-to-learn interface, almost instantaneous startup, a great tutorial, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the footprint of the bloated GNU Emacs. Once I've told them it's available and explained what it does, the majority of our GNU Emacs users have switched. (The only holdouts are the ones that use GNU Emacs for functions for which dedicated programs are really better -- for example, to read mail, news, etc.)

--Brett Glass

The unsung editor...

[PianoMan8]

yep, cast my vote for that one too...

I came over the DOSland ~ 1995 and just needed a good editor. Slackware included jed, and I was hooked. I -STILL- use it wherever I go, and I keep turning more and more people onto it (and slackware for that matter)

John E Davis did a hell of a job on this one, and the new menuing system is very very cool and useful. I wish more people would realize it's not just an "emacs clone".. it's a lot more powerful.

cast my vote for the unsung editor, JED.

PM.

Re:FTE! - got screenshots?

[yist]

http://darklife.org/fte.jpg -- The quality is not that good, I prefered to keep the size down, have a look, I'm using "xfce" as a window manager for the curious.

FTE!

[yist]

I have been using "FTE" for several months now, and I absolutely love it!

It features color syntax highlighting for C/C++, HTML,PERL, TEX, and many more, multiple file/window editing, column blocks, configurable menus and keyboard bindings, mouse support, undo/redo, regular expression search and replace, folding, as well as background compiler execution.

[Stolen from freshmeat entry-- sue me.]

Visit fte's homepage and give it a try.

Emacs is the one true text editor

[jsarnat]

and email client, and web browser, and shell, and tetris game... the list goes on and on.

Nedit: Not too stable for me

[Kamran]

I use nedit at university, and it seems to have the most annoying bugs:
i.e.
CTRL-S crashes the program sometimes (This is the shortcut for saving);(

The shortcut keys also dont seem to work with Num-Lock on.
Very annoying.

Stick to PICO. :)
It works.

Re:Nedit: Not too stable for me

[Kamran]

The University Im at uses redhat 6.1, so I'd presume that they had the latest version of Lesstif (unsure) I didnt think Redhat supplied Nedit. Also where can I get the latest version of nedit from. Is it easy to install, for newbies =). Who have just installed the latest distro of Redhat Debian Corel? KDE editor I found was simple to install, and use when programming, for parsing. I couldn't even find a copy of Nedit (probably my fault :( ) I was just pointing out my few gripes with the program which I suspect most ppl would have. Sorry if I offended anyone. :(

Re:Nedit: Not too stable for me

[nedit]

Lots of Linux users think this about nedit, because Debian and Red Hat put up versions of it paired with early releases of Lesstif. NEdit is only really stable with Lesstif .89.4 and later. There were statically linked (Motif) versions available, but the Linux distributions wouldn't touch them. As a result, lots of people saw those versions and think nedit is crappy and unstable, when it's actually one of the most reliable applications around. NEdit is coming up on a major new release, which is now out in alpha test. As of 5.1, nedit will be under the GPL license, and fully validated with Lesstif. The combination of NEdit with Lesstif is now as rock-solid as the original Motif version was, and 100% GPL.

CE

[toilet]

emacs clone, smaller executable than vi, nuff spread

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[Lightstorm]

> What more could you want?

Well... there's ease of use for newbies, perhaps a smaller memory footprint, a proper GUI, default key bindings which don't cause RSI, and extensibility without having to learn LISP.

The key thing I want from a text editor is the ability to edit text in a nice way, not embedded news readers or psychoanalysis software.

Emacs is very impressive, but I feel the design has been in need of modernisation since window systems made it unnecessary to do everything in one program.

-- Lightstorm.

Notepad [100% OT]

[BlacKat]

Notepad for Win9x has a 32k limit on the size of the text box and can't change font or search and replace. Notepad in WinNT, however, has unlimited text size and it can search-n-replace and you can even change the font. Unfortunatly, the WinNT version of Notepad won't run on Win9x (I've tried).

However, I use PICO all the time on my Linux server and love it. Quick, Simple, Fast, Easy.

-BK

There is Only One

[asgeirn]

cat. If you need more editing power, you have a design problem, not an editor problem.

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[cannon--]

Personally, I think it is vi (my favorite clone is vim).

I can see why people like emacs, but personally, I think it's too bloated for my taste.

vim has syntax highlighting for most any language, auto-indention, and other stuff. I just love using all the vim command mode commands. Like if I mistyped an entire word, I just bcw. Sure, there is something like it, which means that you have to leave the text panel. Esc is an exception, but you use it only when going in to command mode.

I *know* there is a vi workalike for emacs, but I just dont use those featubcwbells and whistles emacs offers me.

vim is what a text editor should have been. it edits text, and it's quick to use.

It's not a text editor with bloat, psychoanalysts, and the kitchen sink. We're just missing a login prompt and a boot loader for emacs to make it a complete operating system.

Remember, that these opinions are my own, and I'm in no way classifying emacs users as idiots. Feel free to be psychoanalysed in your text editor if that's your way of life, and you actually use a millionth of the features.

Re:Jed Kicketh Butteth

[xXRyanDGXx]

No argument needed.
Colored highlighting for C on
top of emacs.
Definitley superior to vi.
right on guys!
-Ryan

Does noone else use pico

[kilf]

Pico's a gret console based ed. It started life as the message editor of pine, but there is now a separate executable for it. All the functions are via control keys, in the familiar pine sytlie. It's small, it's quick and a lurve it.

None of the above

[gadge47]

Frankly, the world could use another open source text editor. I like Emacs well enough and use it quite a bit but it would be refreashing to see something new. Something without all the bloat and all of the increasingly anacronistic controls. And something that was designed to compile on multiple platforms from the get-go (Abiword has done this rather well but it's a word processor).

For instance, a new editor should be designed from the biggining with a GUI. I'm a huge fan of CLIs, but with text editing GUIs buy you a few nice features: squigly red underlines for mispelled words, pop-up boxes representing choices for automatic completion of member functions etc. Pull-down menus for functions, classes etc.

Most of this stuff should be controlable since I recognize that not everyone wants all this crap cluttering up thier display all the time.

And while I'm on it, it would be nice to see some sort of XML standard that specified basic text editor prefs and syntax highlighting settings. That way, prefs could be more easily transported from one compliant text editor to another. Many text editors are powerful but it's litterally useless if people don't know how to use it. This might help a little.

-gsh

My picks

[fde]

Ok, I hate to say this but different editors are vastly useful for different applications.
So these are my votes:

pico -> for quick editing of small or unimportant files which do not require formatting. (eg. most config files)

emacs -> for general coding and editing of large text files

vi -> for when you are introducing new users to *nix systems. It will certainly test their (memory) skills and patience and prove whether or not they are fit to evolve to a higher level of computing beyond MS.

echo "..." >> filename -> great when you really fuck something up on your system and need to regain minimal functionality (ie. setting PATH) without having to type in entire path names to executables. Also good for minimal coding from a rescue disk.

FDE

Of course it's EMACS silly.

[volsung]

It's got 6,000 keyboard shortcuts, it's extensible in LISP, and you can get it to psychoanalyze Zippy. What more could you want? :)

(BTW: That's M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead.)

Re:Of course it's EMACS silly.

[Per Abrahamsen]

Unfortunetely, the one thing vi does well is text maculation. So it doesn't qualify in the text editor category.

Statistics

[volsung]

Okay, here is my extremely informal data based upon a P-166 w/ 96 Meg of RAM:
[Note: All tests were performed with the console version of the editor inside an xterm.]

Editor Load Time Memory Usage
--------------------------------
emacs 0.79 s 2800 KB
vim 0.40 s 1400 KB

So, yes, I will concede that Emacs is bigger and slower. But, I'm a LISP freak, and I like being able to tweak the editor in crazy ways without having to recompile it. On the whole, the difference in memory and speed does not matter to me (.39 s per load * 1000 loads per year = 6.5 minutes wasted per year).

Re:Statistics

[Per Abrahamsen]

emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist -- nearly as big as X.

Only nearly? Emacs is the greatest off all programs! If it temporarily doesn't reflect on its size, that will be fixed with Emacs 21.

Re:Ahhh... you need "pico -w"

[Kurt Gray]

"pico -w" will turn off the goofy line wrapping.

NEdit. Oh an I miss BBEdit.

[Nicolas MONNET]

NEdit is the only editor on Unix which combines all the following characteristics:

• Is stable enough
• Has a sensible GUI
• Isn't too bloated
• and at the same time does'nt have outdated modes (ESC anyone?)
• Decent highlighting
• No significant graphical glitches
• Is dynamically resizable without annyoing flicker

Too bad it uses Motif ...

Keith Bostic, nvi

[paul.dunne]

The award should go to Keith Bostic, for nvi. Surely this is obvious? I'm sure all these other editors are very nice, but why reinvent the wheel?

Re:vim !

[JanneM]

Vim, of course! I was an emacs junkie for several years before I got tired of LISP and om-my-god-I-need-fourteen-fingers-for-this-command style editing. As for features, there really is nothing I miss in vim compared to emacs.

Elvis!

[Arandir]

Everybody is saying vi, but WHICH vi? I heartily nominate elvis!

Smaller than vim, coolest name, best compatibility, and often seen in laundrymats. Besides which, it is default on Slackware, and nothing more needs saying.

Re:PICO PICO PICO! (Or maybe Star Office?)

[AtariDatacenter]

Okay. I'm torn between Pico and Star Office. Star Office clearly is the *best* open source text editor from a technological point of view. However, Pico really has done a lot for me, and the fact that I use it all the time gives it my vote.

Major pico complaint: Wrapping of long lines.

mcedit

[jfunk]

I used to use VI a lot when I first started using Linux. Now I use mcedit most of the time.

F4... ahhh, syntax-highlighting, keys that sort-of coincide with mc keys.

Quick, simple, no macros but I never bothered with that anyway.

Re:Emacs, obviously

[dsplat]

That's fine once you have a file, or at least something to pipe to stdin, but we are talking about a comic strip. I had to retype the text by hand. That requires a text editor. Okay, it doesn't require a text editor. The really masochistic can do it with adb.

Emacs, obviously

[dsplat]

Okay, I'm biased. But what other tool so obviously solves the problem of decoding a rot13'ed comic strip. M-x toggle-rot13-mode.

vim !

[arnim]

ever since i used vim the 1st time i've been thinking zillion times in any other text-editor "damn, this X minutes work would have been :%s/"%$"%%$/&$&$/goi; in vim now"

~
~
~
~
"submission.html" 12 lines, 723 characters

Pico!

[Kurt Gray]

Pico is:

- small
- simple
- useful
- fast
- included. If you've got pine, you've got pico.

I have to at least suggest TECO

[dsplat]

Yes, TECO. To quote Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal:

Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems-- EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor-- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text[4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse-- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.