Comparison: Linux Text Editors

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."

Comments

You're welcome to them.

[jeffb (2.718)]

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.

Re: You're welcome to them.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Em Adespoton]

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.

Re: You're welcome to them.

[MacTO]

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.

[dcollins117]

Or Kate, if it's a girl. And Emacs if you're not quite sure what the hell it is.

Re: You're welcome to them.

[ThePhilips]

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 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, 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.

Re: You're welcome to them.

[TheRaven64]

Code duplication is not free either. Even if execution time is the only thing that you care about, on anything that's vaguely like a modern CPU (GPUs and microcontrollers are somewhat different), instruction cache space is the most scarce resource, with data cache the second. A function call will likely be branch predicted and in an out of order system the prolog and epilog are mostly handled by the register renaming infrastructure, so the function call is almost free, but the cost of an instruction cache miss from having too many copies of the same code is quite measurable.

Pfft

[relisher]

You can do all of this in Emacs and Nano. No need for some shiny new text editor...

Re:Pfft

[Stele]

Okay okay I'll get off your lawn!

Re:Pfft

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Nano has gotten me out of a jam more times than I can count when I couldn't get X working. It's simple, easy to use, and works great.

Re:Pfft

[Darinbob]

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?

[qw(name)]

none of which are named Emacs or Vim

What's there to compare? Everything else is just Notepad.

Re: What's there to compare?

[LocutusOfBorg1]

Exactly! --- sent from emacs

Re:What's there to compare?

[zAPPzAPP]

But Notepad(++) is pretty good...

Re:What's there to compare?

[Arker]

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.'

Re:What's there to compare?

[Darinbob]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Have you seen Gedit lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

The Gnome designers just keep making Gnome's user interface worse and worse to use. I guess that's why so few people use Gnome these days!

Geany

[lorinc]

Where's geany? It's much better than gedit.

Re:Geany

[sayfawa]

Agreed. Without geany there, this comparison is not very useful. Whenever I was using Linux, I missed notepad++, until I found out about geany.

depends on what you're doing

[roc97007]

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.

Re:depends on what you're doing

[Darinbob]

You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.

Re:depends on what you're doing

[cbhacking]

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.

Ed man! !man ed

[kuzb]

( obligatory, credit to: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/... )

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
-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!!!

Please tell me I'm wrong...

[msauve]

Don't all of these text editors require a GUI? I prefer something which can work with a serial/telnet/(basic ssh) console, without all the unnecessary overhead of a GUI. I like joe (which can reasonably emulate emacs/pico, if you want), but can deal with vi if I have to.

Obligatory xkcd cartoon

[Anonymous Coward]

          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..

Steep learning curve

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But EMACS has butterfly mode...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

http://xkcd.com/378/

Who else makes this mistake?

[rossz]

I have a few text files on my Windows box with :wq scattered around in random locations.

There are only 4 editors

[russotto]

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

[jd]

Sigh. Emacs is an operating system with text editing facilities.

Stop mentioning vi and emacs

[Art3x]

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.