Which text editor do you use?
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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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.
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 in the CLI, kate in the GUI
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.
Noobs get hit with friendly fire.
dd or GTFO.
head n-1 > tmp && echo “line replacement” >> tmp && tail -n+1 >> tml && mv tmp orig
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
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
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
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:
---><---
My distro came with Nano, so here I am
kate when I am using GUI and vim when I am using CLI.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
