Text editor debate, zoomer edition

[atharv]

Vim, emacs and VScode are fawned over to death, but I'd like to talk about what other alternatives my fellow young people are choosing.

I personally am a big fan of micro, it does everything a text editor needs to do and with the same intuitive key bindings that late 90s/early 00's kids like us have grown up with for all other programs. A large part of the learning curve for vim/emacs is arguably just getting around the different bindings IMHO.

Sublime text is fine too I guess. What do you guys use?

[steve_v]

There is only one editor, and it's called ed.

[Jamison]

Vi or Kate for me but I still regularly use SciTE from my days of learning a little bit about Ruby and Python (If human memory serves me right it was the official text editor for Ruby, or some opinion told me that at some point?).

https://www.scintilla.org/

https://rubybooks.github.io/
https://inventwithpython.com/

[atharv]

Yeah Kate came built-in with my the Debian KDE install and it seems good enough to use after hiding those eyesore toolbars and menus.

Is SciTE as robust and fast as Notepad++ on Windows? Looks like they are both based on Scintilla

[m4c-attack]

I made the jump to micro last month and enjoy it for quick edits. It has more modern default shortcuts than nano/vim. The downside is that it isn't ideal for shortcuts that go beyond a Windows Notepad-esque experience.

I used to download VS Code or Codium as my default text editor, but as a KDE user, I decided to stick w/ Kate and found that sufficient. It is automatically integrated w/ the rest of my desktop environment so it's one less thing to worry about. I did have to download a package to use the LSP client for bash scripts

[reinob]

I'm definitely not a zoomer (more "generation X" if you go by such labels), but I use vim at the console, and sublime text with GUI.

Many many years ago I used to use emacs for everything (I was young, and my mind could follow along :), and then I started using nano, but I stopped because it had some weird default behaviour of word wrapping by actually "physically" splitting lines. No idea if it still does it, but that certainly did it for me. Hard to gain trust again..

Nowadays I use vim, very lightly (I'm by no means an advanced user), but it does what I want, and doesn't include any nasty surprises.

[cds60601]

I preferred using copy con back in the day

[reinob]

I preferred using copy con back in the day ;)

Oh, you mean like really back in the day? :)
Yup, I used ed and pip (CPM/80 running on Amstrad PCW8256), copy con:, edlin, and debug (!) with MS-DOS.

On the CPM/80 I even wrote my own editor in (Mallard) Basic, to have some sort of "WYSIWYG" when writing programs :).

[cds60601]

I preferred using copy con back in the day

Oh, you mean like really back in the day?

for
LOL - thanks, @reinob for making me a little older than I was 5 mins. ago

[None1975]

Zile (GNU Zile is a small Emacs clone) is also very good.

[Jamison]

I haven't used Notepad++ in a long time, think it was on Debian last

Code: Select all

sudo apt search notepad++
...notepadqq/stable 2.0.0~betal-4 amd64
	Notepad++-like editor for Linux...

...maybe not though it could have been in WINE?

With SciTE's many options files It feels like home in Linux or Windows. E.g:

Code: Select all

# Global initialization file for SciTE
# For Linux, place in $prefix/share/scite
# For Windows, place in same directory as SciTE.EXE (or Sc1.EXE)
# Documentation at http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDoc.html
...

https://math.hawaii.edu/~dale/190/fortr ... properties

Looks like they're closely related to another one that perhaps like Emacs is a system on its own, Geany.

I think on average a teacher would want us to use a simple text editor like Notepad or Vi first. If we have too many bells and whistles to do the work for us, how would we learn?

Where's the line between a text editor and an IDE?

[cds60601]

Where's the line between a text editor and an IDE?

LunarVim? lol

[Jamison]

Vi ta me seems like we have to know some stuff to use it but maybe I don't know enough to say it's an IDE?

[pjmbraet]

I like pluma.
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/pluma
https://github.com/mate-desktop/pluma
and nano in terminal
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/nano
VI or emacs is too much working with keyboard shortcuts for me, some people like that. I prefer pluma and nano. Even installed pluma on an Xfce4 laptop.

[happyfeet8827]

I grew up on dos/Windows 9x so I got used to using the included editor in dos. So when I came over to Linux I tend to lean toward nano and it cousins but I'm always willing to try an editor like jove or vim.

[Cyborg]

Geany and dte in the terminal

[Hetzer]

Mousepad and GNU Nano

[bbbhltz]

micro is nice, I use it for writing my slides in Markdown. Kate is great, especially if you are already using KDE Plasma. Same thing for Geany; solid editor, fast.

I did the Vim tutorials, but quickly forgot about them. Never tried Emacs. I've probably tried others. Definitely used vscode at least once...