Answers to: What is your text editor of choice?

Answer by trbennett48

trbennett48 — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:26:40 -0500

vim, when available, otherwise vi.

Answer by virneto

virneto — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 06:28:55 -0400

Gedit here!! All boosted with developer plugins...Boy It Rocks!!!

Answer by voodoochile

voodoochile — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 01:23:39 -0400

vim or gvim

Answer by larwana

larwana — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 22:57:05 -0400

I use Notepad++ also when I am on Windows. Geany has many of the same features. Numbered lines, color coded text, symbols to denote returns, spaces, and tabs. Also documents pop up in tabs, so it is easy to go between them.

In Mint, Geany is in the Software Manager. It might be worth a try to save yourself having to swap between OSes.

Answer by lsatenstein

lsatenstein — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 20:25:11 -0400

I currently have to code C stuff on a 13 year old AIX Unix box. The terminal handler is horrific, making VI a severe pain to use.
On more modern (Linux) platforms, my commmand line editors are vi and VIM. Often VIM's defaults colors for keywords do not work well with my monitor, so I switch back to VI.

Many times, I will ftp the source to windows and use notepad++. This editor should be ported to Linux. Kedit and gedit are two great GUI editors.

Answer by spacejammin

spacejammin — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 12:58:52 -0400

I use vim in CLI and pluma in GUI

Answer by larwana

larwana — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 12:07:23 -0400

I like Nano to edit from command line. I like Geany from GUI.

Nano allows me to quickly access and edit files while using bash. I play minecraft and use bash to launch the server. I can quickly edit server.properties file without having to click around.

Geany handles GUI text easily. I can edit yaml files, or plain text. The line numbers allow for easy reference when I need to make changes.

Answer by Ahron Townsley

Ahron Townsley — Tue, 28 May 2013 00:12:14 -0400

I use nano in the terminal and sublime text 2 for everything else.

Answer by jcunit

jcunit — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:57:31 -0400

For quickly editing things like configs, I use nano. But for programming, I use vim.

Answer by darkonc

darkonc — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 16:50:39 -0500

I agree that there is no 'best' editor. My main reason for choosing vi over emacs was mostly that emacs was so big (back in the 80s) and vi was on all systems. Now, I'm comfortable with vi(m), and it's now not worth getting up to speed (again) with emacs.

I like the way that I can move quickly through a file with vim but emacs is almost more of a universal IDE/OS. If you lean to use Emacs' add-on tools, it can be pretty powerful. Each tool has it's advantages. which is 'best' depends on how you work and your preferences.

Answer by cfajohnson

cfajohnson — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:45:35 -0500

I do a lot of text editing: shell scripts, HTML (which I use for all my articles), CSS, crossword puzzles, PostScript programs, email, usenet, and even to compose replies to web posts such as this (I use the "It's All Text" extension in Forefox).

I always have an emacs window ('frame' in emacs-speak) open, usually with 50 or more buffers active. (It was over 250 yesterday.)

When I compose email or a usenet message, the app opens an emacsclient window.

When I am creating a crossword puzzle, I use shell mode where I have elisp functions to perform various operations on the word under the cursor: look up the definition, find anagrams, show previous clues for the word, etc.. Others look up and print a list of words that fit in a particular position in the grid.

Answer by Valrian

Valrian — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:56:09 -0500

I use nano in the console because you don't need a PhD to use it. Gedit or leafpad as graphical editor (leafpad opens much faster). I used nedit, which is decent. Also I use "less" a whole lot to simply view documents/files or piped output. "zless" reads compressed text files in /usr/share/doc.

I know a couple people who use Joe, and it seems to be a lovely little editor.

Answer by bocke

bocke — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 02:46:16 -0500

I am a big vim fan and am using for almost anything possible. :)

Answer by KJ4TIP

KJ4TIP — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:31:15 -0500

I typically use emacs, but I'm familiar with vim and ed as well. It seems like a good idea to know vi/vim, since some version of it's available on just about any system, and ed, in case nothing else will work. Both emacs and vim have their merits, though; I use emacs more because I'm more fluent in it, not because I think it's better.

For a beginning coder, though, I'd probably recommend something like geany or Notepad++, both of which I used early on. Both have plenty of features to help coding, but require very little learning to use practically, unlike emacs or vim.

Answer by Arash

Arash — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:14:15 -0400

Vi is my choice too

Answer by Ranjini

Ranjini — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 03:41:06 -0400

I prefer vim. There are a lot of shortcuts which make vim user friendly

Answer by s1na

s1na — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:43:08 -0400

I feel great using vim, for heavy lifting emacs is the one. Although its entirely different for each person, my friend uses nano even for writing and modifying code.

And I really don't get IDEs.

Answer by Freshmeadow

Freshmeadow — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:39:45 -0400

I have to say VIM does the job for me.It is very well documented in books such as the excellent A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming by Mark Sobell. He has an entire tutorial on VIM.

Answer by Rogshoggy

Rogshoggy — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:30:04 -0400

OK let's try this again after the join process. I switched from Wincrap to Linux about 2 1/2 months ago so I am still very much the newbie, that being said I have found most of the info i find out there always seems to start "vi ......." so I have been learning the hard way how to use it, but it's doing everything it says it's supposed to, and I've only touched the surface, and as for a GUI editor, not sure which one to even start looking at!!

Answer by Rogshoggy

Rogshoggy — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:22:17 -0400

being as I am just now getting the hang of Debian and almost all the readme's info and searches on the web give the how-to-do's in vi so I've been learning the hard way how to use it and I haven't played with the GUI editors yet. that's me 1 1/2 cents worth

Answer by SpaceGoat

SpaceGoat — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:12:40 -0400

Gedit for me

Answer by Aniko67

Aniko67 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:10:16 -0400

Personally, I prefer vi over any other for the ease.

Answer by DMcCunney

DMcCunney — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:36:52 -0400

It depends upon the environment, and there isn't just one.

The first editor I used was TSO/SPF on an IBM mainframe, with 3270 block-mode terminals that had a completely different idea of "full screen editing" than we have now.

I started on Unix with AT&T System V in the 80s, and learned vi because it would be available on any Unix machine I used. I came to the PC in the MS-DOS days, and learned WordStar for the same reason - it was likely to be available on any PC I had to work on. (And vi and WordStar share a characteristic: they are keyboard-independant. If you have a QWERTY keyboard and a Control key, you can use them. Some early terminals used on Unix didn't have F-keys or arrow keys, and there was almost as much variation in the early CP/M micros where WordStar originated.)

I gained some fluency in Emacs, too, but normally used vi. Emacs back when worked best if you invoked it when you logged on and did everything from within it - it essentially became your shell. Most of what I was doing as a SysAdmin was config file changes and shell scripts, and Emacs was overkill. (I had Emacs customized to use WS commands to avoid retraining my fingers.)

These days, I use Vim under Linux from the command line, and Geany as a GUI. Geany is a GUI editor intended to be a lightweight IDE, and is based on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control, which adds syntax highlighting for a number of languages and code folding "out of the box".

Under Windows, I use a fork of Florian Ballmer's Notepad2, which is also based on Scintilla, and can be set to replace Windows Notepad, but I have Don Ho's Notepad++, Vim, and Emacs around, as well as various other things.

My choices are largely determined by the content I edit, which is text files, config files and scripts. If I were doing large scale development in C++, Java or the like, I might use a full-blown IDE like Eclipse.

My experience gave me a general interest in editor design, and I'm maintaining a wiki devoted to text editors at http://texteditors.org. Thus far, the wiki has identified 1,690 text editors. If you know of/use one that is not listed, please add it.

Answer by fatmac

fatmac — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 07:16:26 -0400

Obviously vi; also mc(edit).

Answer by Seth Brown

Seth Brown — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:37:32 -0400

Well, back in the DOS day, I used edlin :)

Nowadays, it's vim, an upgrade from vi.

It's the finger memory, you see. My fingers have learned this editor. I like how I can run an external command from within the editor and come back to where I was before. I like the command history. I like how it saves searches and can run them on several files. I like how it can jump from file to file. I like how it can go to the background and come back again.

I don't use a lot of customisations. I move from machine to machine and it would be a pain to have to move .vimrc every time. So I just stick with the basics.

But, damn it's quick.

Answer by barrank

barrank — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:41:53 -0400

When I'm working on the console, I like to use nano. When working on GUI, I like to use textEdit.

Answer by Entomo

Entomo — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:46:07 -0400

For quick and dirty, vim. For programming or anything serious, jEdit. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't come in any distro, but it's awesome anyway.

Answer by SpaceGoat

SpaceGoat — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:13:51 -0500

Gedit, Shell, Hotwire

Answer by dannystaple

dannystaple — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:03:45 -0500

I rotate or switch them regularly. I've used vim, emacs, gedit, eclipse, scite and others. Not so much nano (although I used to use pine an awful lot for email).

Rotating editors first gets you used to finding the best functionality in each, and being able to pimp them out, or quickly get them to behave. It means you can understand frustrations around coding standards and styles that may be awkward in other editors, and you will keep such styles/standards simple when you get a feeling for it.

This helps when working at other developers workstations - ie if you pair up, and swap over for a bit, you don't suddenly feel that awkward "umm - its vi, I don't know how to save" moment.

Most editors have far more functionality than the casual user will know, and plenty experienced users only know different subsets of. I can't say any of them are better, and as for more extendable, it is usually a matter of patience apart from the most simple editors. Generally unless you are using windows notepad.exe (through wine - people dont actually do that do they? Ewww) most editors are very flexible and extendable.

Try it - once you've been through the learning curve for a couple of gui and curses editors, you'll start to get the intuition to find what you are looking for on most editors.

Answer by daves dad

daves dad — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 06:12:12 -0500

sed is excellent. This is the most amazing text editor ever. Then emacs for programming. gedit I use with sudo (for editing system files), as it loads quick. Don't want emacses with different user contexts.

Also been looking at some IDEs: Eclipse(not got far), MonoDevelop(I like better than MS-visual-studio), and Eiffel-Studio (This is the best MS is getting all its [good] ideas for .net from this IDE and language).