Text editor frenzy

Know about vim? emacs? nano? Bah. You have only scratched the surface.

If you can’t find something to your liking here, then you should probably consider building it yourself.

Don’t forget to check the page that tells what editor your favorite free software superhero uses. (In case anyone asks, I begrudgingly use vim. You can add me to the wiki if you want. :mrgreen: 🙄 )

9 thoughts on “Text editor frenzy

  1. Sam Weston

    I alternate between vim, leafpad, gedit and geany depending on my mood, what I’m doing and what PC I’m on. I’m leaning more and more towards using vim for everything these days though.

    I really don’t get the need to argue about text editors that seems to exist in the open source world. If what you use works for you then use it…

    Reply
  2. Calvin

    I hate vim’s keyboard shortcuts, so cream looks interesting.

    But I’m a nano or emacs guy.

    Reply
  3. mulenmar

    I’ve been a happy Leafpad user for a long time, but recently a project has had me longing for the tabbed browing of Gedit. 😦

    Reply
  4. Ygolana

    You can bang in nails with many tools but a hammer would be the best for the job.

    Personally I’d recommend ehammer and Vihammer, electric hammers with digital interfaces and with built in scripting support. I just banged in a bunch of nails at 1338hpm (hammers per minute). The interface also has surface-highlighting (a standard in electric hammers). This monitors walls and other surfaces for weak spots, and spots where nails are safe to hammer. I’m also able to substiture all instances of nails and insert them in other places with one command in both hammers. Want to insert another tool into your DIY? Simple. Just use a command to hook in a drill, or a screwdriver. Want to work on multiple surfaces at once? Easy.

    Then again, some people just want to hang a small picture frame.

    Reply
  5. Zoev

    you wouldnt happen by chance to use vimperator whenever you use firefox? It changes the keys to that of vim, and removes the GUI buttons, just thought it might be interesting.

    Reply
  6. LM

    Since no one else has mentioned it, I have to give a quick mention to SciTE. I can’t work without a decent programming editor with customizable keystrokes. I’ve tried several editors and SciTE’s the only one that’s been able to customize key commands to my satisfaction.

    I’ve recently been looking into gvim/vim/cream as an alternative to SciTE. Cream seemed too slow on older systems. Customized settings and scripts I can create in a few days for SciTE take me months to create to my satisfaction in gvim/vim. SciTE also seemed to run faster with customized settings than gvim did for me. Features like lexer parsing and folding are built into SciTE and don’t need to be run as interpreted code which is slower.

    I also find a good programming editor is becoming more useful to me than a word processor. You can take advantage of a decent programming editor’s integration with a compiler to run all kinds of external tools. I use hunspell with the -u3 option to spell-check a file and output the misspellings in gnu compiler error format. Add the -H option to spell-check an HTML file. A decent programming editor will let you quickly jump to files and lines in the error listings. I also have external tools to lock and unlock files if multiple people are editing them and to ftp edited web files to a web site more quickly than starting up an ftp client. I really like using diffh through a programming editor to compare two files. With programs like wkhtmltopdf, I can convert HTML documents into PDF files or postscript. Using markup languages like HTML or even LaTeX, one can create documents as complicated as in a word processor or desktop publishing program with just a standard text editor.

    Reply
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