Which text editor do you use?
It’s worse than the picture depicts. It’s not just the lovers, the elitists and the evangelists, it’s the sheer range of choice too, beyond the loudest.
Nano because I’m too lazy to learn vim or emacs. I want something that works and not something that operates like cheat codes in old video games.
The reasons us elders use VI is because on a new installation, it was the only thing available until:
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You are lucky enough to find a compiled version of PINE/PICO, or
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You have the compiler installed, and can get the source code and build it yourself.
For some reason, some elitists decided that if you don’t know that, then you are a failure. But honestly, when modern distros started coming out with WYSIWYG-type editors, it was a relief, even though I reverted to VI/VIM because of muscle-memory, I do not push it on new users. It’s the same argument people make for driving manual vs automatic, sure it’s useful, but when was the last time you even saw a manual car? (At least in North America).
You want to live dangerously, go ahead and put NetBSD with just the basics and leave the rest of us who want to do something useful alone.
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First choice: use a normal damn GUI text editor
Second choice: Nano. It’s simple and comprehensible, and a best CLI choice for newbies. You can then turn to vim, emacs, or whatever, but don’t make your life harder from the get-go
People suggesting to start with Vim are probably the same ones pushing for Arch as a first distro. C’mon.
That’s how you breed scrubs who can’t M-x-butterfly. I say give them a distro that boots into vi and starts a background process that block internet access around them. If they manage to quit vi and kill the daemon, they’re ready for Linux.
Lol
use a normal damn GUI text editor
The right choice as long as you don’t want to edit code/config files. Trust me, writing code inside libre office is not fun.
Libre office isn’t a text editor it’s a document processor; more like a gui for something like TeX, or realisticially html, than a program for reading/editing plain text.
Kate is a basic GUI text editor that can highlight syntax, suggest options and do other things useful for code and configs. Comes with KDE (which is a common newbie recommendation) and is available as Flatpak everywhere else.
But sure, there are instances where you should use CLI text editors. If you need to edit text files as root, this is generally the best option. Also, it’s the only option for headless setups and SSH. For that, nano will do.
Was gonna write that only one true text editor exists. But okay, you are right, of course
Why would you need a text editor when you can just do
cat > file?smh
This command will literally overwrite the file that you do whenever you try to edit it. You need two >> to append at the end of a file, but it’s super-duper hard to put text in the middle of a file from the terminal. That is why people use editors, for sure. Now that I think about it, there probably is some psychopath who uses the actual command line as an editor. They’re probably more elitist than Vim users lol.
Sounds like a skill issue tbh
Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.
there’s an emacs mode for that
Thinking out loud here. Head in a temp file, cat, tail the rest and then overwrite?
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vi because it’s everywhere, even on servers where packages can’t be downloaded or shouldn’t be installed.
This is my reply every time someone suggests nvim. Is it on the servers I use but I’m not an admin for? No? Then it doesn’t sound like a great option.
My favourite editor is the first one I find that’s installed
Nano in the CLI, kate in the GUI
All I’m gonna say is than nano is installed on almost every Linux os and has the keyboard shortcuts written on the UI.
Who doesn’t have vi/m?
Fwiw, helix also gives visual feedback on bindings if a key is a table for mutiple bindings.
I’m sorry I don’t see how that’s relevant to my point.
I’m saying that of all the text editors, nano is the one that usually takes the least amount of effort to learn and set up. Both of those options require either learning or set up, so why would I choose them if convinience is what I’m after?
I was just asking which distros don’t have vi/m. The helix point was an aside. It wasn’t combative, just curious.
I wouldn’t know tbh. I’ve never had any reason to use anything other than nano for a terminal text editor.
dd or GTFO.
head n-1 > tmp && echo “line replacement” >> tmp && tail -n+1 >> tml && mv tmp orig
I feel called out but the only time I’m editing a file is tweaking a config or .env file and its just so simple for me
signature look of superiority
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Not even Notepad ++? Damn
Notepad++ doesn’t have Notepad’s awesome AI features, clearly
🤮🤮
Kate master race of KDE
I don’t understand the issue. I’ve been using Linux less than a year but I started with a KDE desktop so it came with Kate, Kwrite, and Nano. I’ve literally never needed anything else.
I’ve tried out a couple IDEs like Codium and Geany, but I don’t see what they offer that Kate doesn’t.
I’ve also at least opened Emacs but I didn’t get much further than that.
I use Nano in the terminal when I’m editing config files because I read somewhere that it’s safer.
I installed Neovim and Micro but I haven’t explored those at all yet. I don’t have any problems with Nano.
I tried Pluma but I really only use it for dumping lists.
For the most part I use Kate, but for simpler notes I use Kwrite just to keep them in separate spots on my launcher.
I don’t see why this is such an issue though.
You usually don’t take the time to learn vim or Emacs just to write some notes. The real value of such powerful and highly customisable text editors only shows itself when you are editing lots and lots of text on a regular basis (e.g. codimg, writing blogs or any other form of writing)
The advantage vim and emacs have is, that they have keybindings for about everything you could ever want. This has the advantage, that once you know how to use them, your working speed massively increases, but it takes quite some time to learn the keybindings. Another advantage and disadvantage of (neo) vim and emacs is, that both are being modified by config files. This comes at the advantage of being able to modify about everything about your editor, but means that sometimes it can be quite hard to implement a specific behaviour. The next advantage is, that your configuration becomes easily portable and extensible. Implementing a specific behaviour often only requires copy pasting a 15 year old stackoverflow post and if you want to move to a new device, you just have to grab your config files and are good to go.
Emacs also has orgmode directly integrated into it, which can be used to write text and format it (similar to Markdown, but much more powerful) and even export it to other formats like HTML or LaTeX. As you might expect, orgmode also has its own keybindings. This means, that you can write your documents inside emacs [orgmode], use all the powerful text formatting tools and keybindings and then share your work in a nicely formatted and portable way.
I use
- sublime-text when not confined to a terminal
- nano for example with git’s CLI
- vi/vim when the others are not available.
Nothing wrong with Kate. I know how to use Nano because it’s an essential skill for when your machine boots into emergency mode, but aside from that editing text from the terminal is lunacy.
Welcome to Team Kate. There are dozens of us!
