Editors

[enk]

I'm almost always on a slow connection

That's what ed was meant for


For people who like the accessibility of a standard editor: Learn to enjoy it & stop complaining

IMO pico/nano is too simple to actually enjoy and ed is not very user friendly. That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

[Arancaytar]

what ed was meant for

Yes, but I'm too much of a noob for ed.

[psykx]

Kwrite for the WIN, there is just something about kate that makes me cringe with bloat although I have to admit I use eclipse for almost all of my programing (php and java atm). For the CLI I use nano or pico. I once tried to get into vi or emacs and then I realised that it was pointless I don't have any problems using kwrite

[Arancaytar]

That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

vi is symlinked to vim on just about every system I've seen. This has led to me taking up the habit of typing "vi" to start it. I would probably be very surprised if I was ever using a system that didn't do this, and was suddenly faced with vi instead of vim.

[enk]

That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

vi is symlinked to vim on just about every system I've seen. This has led to me taking up the habit of typing "vi" to start it. I would probably be very surprised if I was ever using a system that didn't do this, and was suddenly faced with vi instead of vim.

We have this server at my university, it's Solaris 9 from 2002. vi is certainly vi and they didn't install vim until I asked them last year (and no symlinkage...). Luckily I'm going to the real CS institute next year.

[aldimond]

The default install of FreeBSD has nvi (a vi clone) and not vim; vi is symlinked to nvi and remains so after vim installation. At least that's how it was last time I had a working FreeBSD machine.

Fair enough to me. nvi is what you want sometimes. Like when your IDE controllers go berserk and change how they refer to your disks (possibly because you dropped the laptop so many times that the not-designed-to-be-removable CD drive fell out), so your /usr partition is unavailable and you just need to make some quick changes to your /etc/fstab to get yourself back working again. Typing vi Just Worked (because nvi was in /bin and probably statically linked)

If this happened on my Linux box, where vi is linked to vim, in all its dynamically linked glory, I would have been down to ed. Actually the changes I had to make in that case could have been easily accomplished with a sed one-liner, but it's nice to have visual verification that you're doing it right sometimes.

EDIT: correction. My Linux box is (sadly) running Gentoo, which has nano in /bin, and ldd output indicates it should be able to run without anything from /usr. I am better at ed than nano, though.

[enk]

For those of you who prefer simple editors ("emacs is too weird and heavy", "you can't type in vim"), I'd like call attention to evim, which is vim running in "easy mode". It's an easy to use, widely available and powerful editor.

You use arrow keys and you type to write, just as you'd expect. It's still not as easy as pico/nano, but you get access to all the neat features of vim. And it's just as available as vim, which I'm pretty sure is more widely available than pico/nano/joe/emacs.

[headprogrammingczar]

Emacs is pretty widely available...

[EvanED]

I have used a system without it though. I built and installed it in my home directory. It was a Sun Niagra system, which is an 8-core 4-way SMT CPU. It felt wonderful to run the command 'make -j32'

[headprogrammingczar]

8-core 4-way SMT CPU

WANT!

[Voidpointer]

Emacs all the way.

My biggest problem is when source control commits open a VI terminal and I blithely hit c-x c-s which of course causes VI to go into Akira mode, and I basically have to run for the emergency fire ax down the hall to kill it before it turns into a giant blob of cyberflesh bent on ingesting Tokyo.

[hotaru]

Emacs is pretty widely available...

where can i get emacs with a real free software license?

[masher]

Doesn't the GPL do it for you?

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

[hotaru]

Doesn't the GPL do it for you?

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

no, it doesn't.
i consider anything more restrictive than the (revised, 3-clause) BSD license non-free, and i strongly prefer the ISC, MIT/X11, and 2-clause BSD licenses over that.

[masher]

Fair enough.

I'm not really in the loop with the different flavours of licence....

[qbg]

Emacs is pretty widely available...

where can i get emacs with a real free software license?

Hemlock is an emacs-style editor and may be free enough. (Might be public domain, but I'm not sure)

[sakeniwefu]

Doesn't the GPL do it for you?

no, it doesn't.

What about public domain?

[hotaru]

Doesn't the GPL do it for you?

no, it doesn't.

What about public domain?

comparing mg to emacs is like comparing busybox vi to vim.

[sakeniwefu]

comparing mg to emacs is like comparing busybox vi to vim.

Sorry, I didn't notice you were just trolling for the sake of it
So you ditch emacs for being GNU(yet you use not only vim but also busybox)? Speak about hypocrisy. RMS would be proud of you

[hotaru]

comparing mg to emacs is like comparing busybox vi to vim.

Sorry, I didn't notice you were just trolling for the sake of it
So you ditch emacs for being GNU(yet you use not only vim but also busybox)? Speak about hypocrisy. RMS would be proud of you

no, i don't use vim, and i only use busybox when i don't have any other choice. i usually use vi or nvi. the fact that i know what features an editor has doesn't mean that i use it.

[Soljer]

Windows:
Notepad++ For most code/general text editing
Eclipse for java
Microsoft Word for word processing

Linux:
Notepad++ through wine or gedit for code/general text editing if I have GUI
vim or emacs through the command line (I don't prefer one over the other)
Open Office for word processing

[Likpok]

The basic fact is that both emacs and vim have crippling faults. Emacs does some cool things, but decided on elisp as a language. Vim does some cool things, but is nowhere near modifiable enough.

So we are at an impasse.

Until YI, the most recursive editor comes up to snuff. It's written in Haskell (so you have a good language) and is hot-re-compilable (no interpretation! small!) and configurable (in haskell!).
Modal (if you want) or not (if you want).

It's like a lovechild of emacs and vim, but without all the suck. (note that development is not yet done, not all of your favorite features may exist)

[Berengal]

(note that development is not yet done, not all of your favorite features may exist)

Awesome unicode characters in my haskell code is awesome;

Code: Select all

import Control.Arrow((&&&))                                                                                                           
import Data.List(group)                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                       
factorial ∷  Integer → Integer                                                                                                         
factorial 0 = 1                                                                                                                       
factorial n                                                                                                                           
    | n ≤  −1 = error "Division by zer... wait..."                                                                                     
    | otherwise = n × factorial (n − 1)                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                       
primes ∷  [Integer]                                                                                                                   
primes = 2:3:5:[n | n ←  [7,9..], all (λp →  mod n p == 0) (takeWhile (≤ (ceiling · sqrt · fromInteger) n) primes)]                   
                                                                                                                                       
runlength ∷  (Eq a) ⇒ [a] →  [(a, Int)]                                                                                               
runlength = map (head &&& length) · group                                                                                             


but it's still a few features short of useable. Mainly it lacks self-documentation. If I had that I could probably try to hack the rest. As it stands, emacs is still the superior Haskell editor, but I look forward to the day YI gets a proper tutorial.

[evilbeanfiend]

Emacs all the way.

My biggest problem is when source control commits open a VI terminal and I blithely hit c-x c-s which of course causes VI to go into Akira mode, and I basically have to run for the emergency fire ax down the hall to kill it before it turns into a giant blob of cyberflesh bent on ingesting Tokyo.

get source control to open emacs instead then? whats EDITOR set to in your environment ?

[Ptolom]

I've been using a combination of nano and gedit. Is it really worth switching to vim or emacs? How bad should I feel for not knowing any of the more "advanced" editors?

[Area Man]

I've been using a combination of nano and gedit. Is it really worth switching to vim or emacs? How bad should I feel for not knowing any of the more "advanced" editors?

Open a terminal and type vimtutor, go through the exercises. I think you'll be surprised at how much you can do without a mouse, and without learning crazy deathgrips.

[0xBADFEED]

Awesome unicode characters in my haskell code is awesome;
<...snip...>

I couldn't tell whether you're talking about YI or not.

But you can do that in Emacs too. I have my Emacs haskell-mode set up to do Unicode replacement for Haskell operators.

Makes it look mathy...

[netcrusher88]

vim, all the way.

It should be noted that on systems where vi is symlinked to vim, it launches vim in "compatibility mode" (also accessible with :set compatible) which is designed to be vi-compatible - although it isn't entirely.

I tried emacs for a while, didn't much like it. I think it does come down to what someone said about two pages back: emacs is a programmer's text editor/IDE/OS/kitchen sink, whereas vim is great for sysadmins, which is my chosen path. Obviously there's a lot of counterexamples and both can be used for the other. I really prefer vim period. I don't do that whole chording thing.

[SJ Zero]

Whenever I'm in Windows, notepad is filled with win and god. You can't beat it, don't even try.

For at least a decade, since I first fired up the mini-linux distribution I found that ran linux .98 from a distribution of slackware, a vi clone is almost universally installed by default, so it's stupid to use anything else. I can type 'vi' in BeOS, or macOS, or FreeBSD, or any one of a bunch of different operating systems, and get something I can use. Emacs could be really cool. I don't know, and I don't care, because odds are I'm going to have to use vi to edit something before I can get it -- since I've got to learn it anyway, why not just use vi?

[Ptolom]

I've been using a combination of nano and gedit. Is it really worth switching to vim or emacs? How bad should I feel for not knowing any of the more "advanced" editors?

Open a terminal and type vimtutor, go through the exercises. I think you'll be surprised at how much you can do without a mouse, and without learning crazy deathgrips.

ok then. I'll have a go

[MHD]

SciTE > All

[Jengajam2]

I use nano when I am in command line on my slackware box, Gedit on my ubunu laptop, and Geany whenever I'm trying to learn Python.

[enk]

since I've got to learn it anyway, why not just use vi?

I enjoy the ubiquitousness of vi as well, but it has more qualities than the ubiquitousness!


Edit: Let's do a fundraising so hotaru can get a computer fast enough to run vim

[hotaru]

Edit: Let's do a fundraising so hotaru can get a computer fast enough to run vim

i have several computers fast enough to run it, i just prefer not to have to sit and wait for a quarter of a second for my editor to start. it's not a lot of time but it's enough to break my rhythm when i'm working on 3 or 4 things at once

[phider2]

I use nano, because it works fine and I'm too lazy to learn emacs or vi(m).

[InkL0sed]

Xcode

[stephentyrone]

Xcode

XCode with vi keybindings.

[Troy Martin]

GEdit on Xubuntu. *ducksandruns*

Stable, lightweight, highlighting, and generally out of the way of most major editor wars.

[null1024]

On the *nices:
Vi is my favorite, then Pico/Nano. I'm crippled on Emacs, at that point I just do an "echo /dev/tty > file.txt" to try to do anything.

On Windows:
EDIT.COM [it's mislabeled, it's really an EXE], the one that's come with every Windows version since 95 [all other versions suck, especially the FreeDOS one, I gave up there, and installed Vi]. Customizable colors, no need to hit the spacebar, ever, and it's a console app. What more could you want? And for doing ASCII art? Amazing. Move the cursor where you want, click there even! It's amazing.

And then maybe Notepad/Metapad. I like ConTEXT as well, but it's too bulky.

[enk]

On the *nices:
Vi is my favorite, then Pico/Nano. I'm crippled on Emacs, at that point I just do an "echo /dev/tty > file.txt" to try to do anything.

If you by "vi" mean "vim": Why not run it on Windows as well? What's this idea people have that vim (and emacs as well) are just for *nix?
(if you really mean vi, check out vim...)

no need to hit the spacebar, ever

Huh?

And then maybe Notepad/Metapad.

Metapad >> Notepad.