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.
Kate
Kwrite
when I use kde I prefer to use this edit too
Came here to say kate! I tried a bunch of them before but kate is nice :3. And then I have nano for the terminal
The only sad thing about Kate? No terminal version of this beauty.
It has a few quirks I utterly despise :(
Like it cannot print invisible characters. Had a script create some broken folders with a BOM character at the beginning. I couldn’t access the files in any way except that they appeared in dolphin and ls. Had to delete them via the fucking inode.
I was forced to use VSCode (an open source fork at least) to find out what the fuck was wrong with the input file the script used to generate the folder name.
Like it cannot print invisible characters.
I was looking at an option to display invisible characters in Kate like last week. So it got better, I guess.
Only non-printable spaces from what I can tell.
The BOM character does not fall into this category and is still invisible. Try pasting it into Kate. It’s between those arrows:
---><---
Kate is by far the best GUI text editor I ever used. And unless it’s a short config file and I use nano, I want GUI. It’s not the 80s anymore!
It’s not the 80s anymore, thus I want a good TUI over GUI any day
vim, because that’s how my father taught me, and how his father’s father taught him.
Choose vim! The generational trauma of file editors!
haha!
Sometimes I feel like my side of the holy war isn’t engaging in completely good faith.
I might switch sides to emacs if my fingers were long enough to reach the key combinations.
Maybe I’ll go try it, anyway!
…
What was the command to exit
vi, again…?The same as for man pages and less and a bunch of other cli tools.
Q. For Quit.
Ah, I see that your : is silent.
Me no love nano, me brain only can use nano.
E macs scary. vim no let me leave :(
You might like micro :) its like nano but with more user friendly features like Ctrl+s for save, and clicking places to change cursor location. I think you have to enable the “cheat sheet” of keyboard commands being visible all the time if you want it to always be showing like I do
It also supports extensions but I don’t really care about that lol. I just want something simple with nice ux :)
p sure latest nano can do all that, you can atleast change the bindings to ctrl s in the .nanorc file and im p sure most distros include a build of nano that has mouse support. If its supported by the build, its just a settings toggle in the rc file likr the bindings :)
Micro also has syntax highlighting, multiple buffers with split editors, and theming, among other things. It’s pretty dang neat
sounds cool, youve convinced me, gonna grab a copy and check how the feature set compares ✌️
less is more,
micro does more than nano,
many names, much confuse.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
My requirements for a text editor:
- it displays ‘A’ when I press the ‘A’ key
- doesn’t require more than 1 minute of learning to use it
Bonus points if it comes pre installed.
Idk it took me 3 attempts to learn (neo)vim, but now every Linux system I SSH in I just go straight for vi(m), because moving around and editing in Nano is just so slow when you’re used to vim keys.
I swear I’m not trying to proselytize. People should use whatever they want, and these discussions are pointless. It’s all just tradeoffs and getting used to things.
Hah. The text editor I wrote has that covered.
… ignore the bugs.
Kate master race of KDE
As a new Linux user who spends as little time editing config files as I can manage, I’m fine with nano.
I think Micro is even easier. Nano is good too though.
I was too untilI switched to opensuse aeon and default is vim instead of nano. I just switched. I don’t care. Both are not perfect - i won’ create yet another fork just because i want to do it differently. I don’t get why vim has so few shortcuts.
I don’t get why vim has so few shortcuts.
Someone’s gotta do it. I’m leaving this comment so it’s not me.
I was playing around with Free BSD I think and the default was Vi. I was just like “yeah, no” and gave up. I didn’t have wi-fi working so I couldn’t install anything else.
Emacs with Vim’s modal editing.
You guys edit text?
Claude, remove spotify from sources.list
I have completed the following tasks that you requested:
- ✅ Uninstalled Spotify
- ✅ Deleted Spotify account
Anything else I can help you with?
