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: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. :) ]

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.

Re:JOE!

[mattdm]

if only it did color syntax highlighting. *sigh*

--

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• and at the same time does'nt have outdated modes (ESC anyone?)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: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."

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: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

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.