Voice of the Masses: Which text editor do you use?
Vim vs Emacs vs Nano vs gEdit vs Kate vs ed: everyone has a favourite text editor, and some people get very passionate about it. You might love the fact that Vim can do crazily complex editing jobs with just a few keystrokes, or perhaps you’re a fan of the Emacs operating system text editor. Maybe you can’t stand the complexity of either of these, and get your work done in good old Nano.
In any case, let us know your thoughts and we’ll read them out in our next podcast recording! And it’s going to be a classic: we’re recording in Munich, and have a special guest presenter from the LibreOffice team. So if you’ve got anything to say about that suite, now’s your chance… (The podcast will go online a few days later than usual.)
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
Notepad.exe
(Not really of course, it’s Vim. Because it’s fluent and fluid and know what you want to do before you do (once you’ve learned it a bit))
Emacs is my choice. It can be anything I want. Users can extend the editor with the implementation language of the editor itself (Emacs Lisp). So users don’t live in a separate sandbox. Emacs is even Vim if one wants (and some do, see evil-mode).
I used Vim for several years (and it’s really great) but eventually realized that Emacs is better for me. It supersedes Vim.
Vim, once you’ve watched everything at http://vimcasts.org
I decided to give it a go about 5 years back after hearing some hype about it, and loved it almost instantly. Periodically, I make a new effort to refine my Vim environment by looking up popular plugins and suggestions for common workflows. Vimcasts has been the most useful resource for this.
Possibly the greatest revelation for me was when I discovered how to enable mouse interaction in console Vim. Since then, I’ve switched almost completely from using separate gvim and console windows, to a single full-screen console, console Vim, and tmux: an amazing combination that works just as well on a remote server via SSH as it does on the local machine.
Nano for minor things, Emacs for anything I’ll be doing for a while. Vim looks big and scary, so I think I’ll stay away.. and Emacs has Emacs Lisp.
I used to use emacs all the time, but in recent years have fallen back on simpler approaches. If in a GUI I tend to opt for Gedit. In a command line environment, then it’s nano all the way. Or “pico” as I still inevitably type – a long, hard to dislodge remnant of my introduction to Unix at university back in 1996!
Vim for me.
For a few reasons:
-> its installed on pretty much every Linux box. If its not installed.. Its always going to be available through a package manager.
-> its by far the fastest and most productive way I have found to edit files. I’m a developer by trade.
-> you can have 100s of vim processes on the go and will not impact your memory / CPU in a significant way. Try that with eclipse or other modern IDE.
-> modal editing (yes there is a learning phase) is really amazing.
-> although vimscript sucks it makes the editor infinitely hackable.
-> because vim is so light weight I edit config files in the same way that I do python files.I love this.
-> lesser known features like buffer line and word completion make it very powerful.
-> regex search is brilliant.
-> much like Linux u can always find something new in vim.
All of this aside, its free and open source software.
Also Ctrl p is a must have plugin if u use vim as your IDE.
It’s Emacs for me all the way.
You’re right, it is far more than just a text editor, and I do use it more as an interface to do everything I need to do on my PC … but it is still one hell of a text editor.
I use it as an IDE, for email, RSS aggregator, Twitter client, blogging tool, Wiki editor, IRC client – it has a package for just about everything.
But the killer package for me Org. As well as keeping me organised with a calendar and todo lists, anything I write, be it notes, essays, reports or presentations, I can export to just about any format. Indeed, the same piece of writing can be exported to multiple formats, like ODT, PDF, S5, Beamer, HTML. I even use the Jekyll package to maintain a website in Org-Mode.
Very importantly, the communities for Emacs and Org offer essential help and support when I want to try new things.
I could go on all day advocating Emacs – it becomes a way a life, and I believe Richard Stallman has something to do with it.
Oh, and did I mention it’s a brilliant text editor as well?
Gedit for regular stuffs, and Geany for programming
I’m starting to learn python and use Geany that comes as default in good old CrunchBang.
Seems to do me fine.
Emacs. Before discovering Emacs I just used to use whatever editor was at hand. I then discovered the power of plain text – especially with Org-mode. I now implement a complete plain text GTD system with Emacs which I can use on anything, any phone or any PC using any app or program which can read plain text and I don’t have to worry about email archive format compatibility or which bits of ical a developer has decided to bother with. Being able to access the web (w3m) and access emails and news with Gnus makes it easy and fast to import anything I want from the internet. I know non-Emacs users think that we are completely bonkers for wanting to use Emacs for as much as we can but once you have the hang of the key bindings the speed you can rattle things off is pretty awesome.
Note for other Emacs users; try ansi-term instead of the normal shell buffer – it’s so cool you can run MC in it (pointless and stupid I know, especially in view of dired, but it gives you the same warm cosy glow as wobbly windows or spinney cubes!)
Disclaimer – please note that Vi(m), Nano, Pico, Joe, Jed, MCEdit, Kate, Gedit and all of the others I couldn’t remember are brilliant editors as well!!!!!!!
On the command line, I use nano on boxes that have got it, vi if they don’t.
When programming, I use netbeans with the PHP plugin, or if I’m not at my machine, I use http://c9.io or Github.
Mind you, you can’t discuss editors without throwing in the obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/378/
I use as many text editors as I can, because freedom! Really, though, using multiple text editors leaves me free to use the best tool for the job, not simply the tool with which I am most familiar. It helps me to sympathize with new users, keeps my problem-solving skills sharp, teaches me new ways of looking at text files, and is just plain fun.
I believe that you *should* be especially proficient with the one or two text editors that best solve your problems for you, but you should likewise test the waters whenever you have the time. Who knows, you may just find a new favorite text editor in the process.
I use gedit for simple text editing and LibreOffice for the more complex stuff.
The only reason I use it and not something else is that it was the first text editor I was told to use to complete something simple back in about 2007 when I started using Linux. I’ve just not been that bothered to change.
PS The Captcha is working better today.
Kate – I am a KDE guy, so what else would I use?
Well, I’ve said it before, so I might as well say it again: mcedit, easy to use and comes with a handy file manager.
I generally use either scite or geany for most text editing (i.e. programming), although since the vim tutorial in LV learning vim has been high on my to-list (which I edit with nano todo.txt 😛 ), so my answer will probably change the next time I have some free time.
vim.
I’ve been using vi since 1989 when the grumpy old sysadmin at uni told me to harden up and learn it. 2 months of frustration, 25 years of productivity. Some people watch me use vim and say “Wait a minute – what did you just do?” Most of the time I can’t even remember; it’s muscle memory now.
For academic papers, I tend to use LibreOffice because I couldn’t be bothered writing formatting by hand in TeX or markdown or whatever, although I’m sure that in some respects it would be better. But styles make up for a lot of those other features in terms of saving time.
When I was doing a lot of Java coding, I used Eclipse for all the nifty real-time editing features like code completion, and I’m playing with NetBeans for PHP/HTML5 at the moment for the same reason.
But for basically everything else, only vi is needed.
vi
g/vim mostly – I do lots at the command line and on servers over ssh. It is always available.
I also do a lot with DocBook (xml) and vim has a nice xml plugin. I have also been looking in to using asciidoctor.org as a documentation replacement – so any text editor will do then.
When in the GUI (and not using gvim) I have been playing with LightTable (lighttable.com), Textadept (foicica.com/textadept) and about to look at Atom.io – all three appear to be great at both plain text and coding related tasks and all are capable of being fully keyboard driven. LightTable even has a plugin to switch it into VIM mode.
When I have to (for work – documenting our IDE) I will also use our Eclipse based IDE.
I favour vim and LightTable at the moment 🙂
I use Medit (http://mooedit.sourceforge.net/). A nice straightforward syntax-highlighting GTK editor.
I mostly use it for shell scripting, SlackBuilds and web stuff.
That said, I have used Vi/m a lot – that is what I used to set up an xorg.conf/Xfree86config back when that was a manual job.
Gedit is a really nice solid program, it’s perfect for me. It’s so good don’t think I have even tried anything else. Is Kate still around?
Kate! It won the editor award in LV so enough said 🙂
And if anyone is using vi/nano remotely you really shouldn’t. You should edit locally and push to servers so you are storing a consistent revision controlled config file using your deployment system (saltstack/puppet/chef etc.)… *cough* yes I’d never use nano remotely…
vim for all things unixy.
notepad++ when in an MS world.
Vim on and off for about 10 years and only Vim for about 3 of them but switched to Sublime Text (paid for, non-free) about 2 years ago because I was messing vim up with plugins and didn’t want to sort it out 🙁 a poor reason I know. It’s still my goto for terminal things and remote servers or when I’m on someone else computer and they’re using something… dumb.
Recently I’ve been trying to switch to PHPStorm for my day job, but it’s just not there.
Vim for the win! I switched to Vim a year and a half ago, when I started developing more and more on Linux (previously, my editor of choice was the Windows-only Notepad2). Vim was recommended to me by a colleague, and eventually I saw his wisdom after a month or so of use. 🙂
I’ve been a long time Emacs user because it’s the ultimate adaptable tool for working with text. I read my email, apply patches, compile my code, launch tests, organise my tasks (org-mode) with something that still weighs in less than the mega-IDEs and their sluggish mouse based interfaces.
But of course you should really invest in the one you find most suited to your use-case. Try out vi(m) and emacs and choose the one you like 😉
I forgot to mention I use the handy little “zile” for quick editing of files which follows the default Emacs key bindings.
Emacs. When I started using GNU/Linux and I was looking for an editor to code in I tried both Vim and Emacs for a while, but Vim’s moded editing just didn’t work for me.
Now, for about a week or two, I’ve been using evil-mode in Emacs, to have vi-like moded editing and keybindings. That is Mike’s fault, he was too damn enthusiastic about Vim. I have to change a lot of the keybindings though, hjkl just doesn’t make any kind of sense when using the Colemak keyboard layout. So far I’m quite happy with the combination, all Emacs keybindings are turned back on in insert-mode (thanks to the colemak-evil package) and that really makes it the best of both worlds, in my opinion. Vim is great at editing existing text and code, though I still much prefer the Emacs keybindings when writing a lot of new text.
I use Emacs almost for everything, and even the things I can’t do in Emacs (proper web-browsing with javascript and css enabled) I try to do in an as-Emacs-way as possible, using the Conkeror web browser for most browsing and the Keysnail add-on in Firefox if I can’t use Conkeror.
For small or remote edits I’ll use either zile or mg (both emacs-like editors) and only vim if I have no other options, though usually using Tramp in Emacs will be preferable.
Emacs…
just because it fits all my edit-tasks. It serves both needs:
There is almost no feature which can’t be handled by one of the zillons emacs specialised modes albeit the edit-basics remain always the same!
You get always the same editor but can redefine it to do whatever you want or need
Vim, with this essential plugin:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1189
Vim! I love vim! Having so many powerful functions available at a few keypresses. And the fact that you can combine them in consistent ways makes it relatively easy to learn. I wish I could use the vim interface for everything. I use the vimperator plugin in Firefox to browse with vim. Vim!
Gedit came with my XFCE, but those Gnome designers, knowing what’s best for me, dumbed down the interface. There was no apparent way to fix it.
So I’m on Pluma. Also have installed Bluefish, Komodo Edit, Brackets, and others for experimental or situational use.
Another Emacs user here. Like others I run my entire life using org-mode. My web sites are written using org-mode and I also use it for all my writing, as org-mode can export in most formats.
If I am away from home I carry round a Chromebook and use the Chrome ssh client to access Emacs on my Linode. If I know in advance I won’t be able to connect to the Internet, I can boot Arch on the Chromebook. I use git to manage my org-files. This makes it easy to work on multiple computers and has saved me a few times when I need an earlier version of a file – did I really mean to delete all that text:)
Also I use Tramp mode to edit files on remote servers.
Emacs. I use it for web programming (Rails + JS), git version control (using magit plugin), twitter (twittering-mode), IRC and use org-mode for notes, timesheets, updating a blog & knowledge base, scheduling tasks and updating google calendar.
I find myself using it for more and more. I also use it for remotely working on configuration files over ssh using tramp-mode.
As Yukihiro Matz (inventor of Ruby) once said emacs has changed my life. http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life
Vim.
or emacs with evil-mode
I have tried other editors, and found that some (gedit, notepad++, and others)
don’t even have real indentation, some are closed source (sublime text), some
are OS dependent (textmate), and some (atom) are bloated and need documentation.
None of them comes close to Vim.
1. Normal mode with commands and motions.
2. A register for every key that can hold macros.
3. ex commands.
4. So many powerful plugins like Vundle, fugitive, Ultisnips, Surround, etc.
5. Amazingly simple ways to mix macros, commnads, scripts, etc. together.
6. An amazing help system that full of documentation (emacs has this too).
The only thing I feel like vim is missing is support for multiple windows the
way emacs does.
VI/VIM for more or less everything.
However I am getting tempted to give emacs a few weeks because the more I see it the more amazing it seems.
emacs
Nothing more to see here, move along…
Ghex, Hexedit vi nano pico kate vim emacs geany depanding what I need to do and what is available
My main editor is gedit. cz I use python and gedit is as simple as python. I am also a fan of vim(not vi) in command line. I want to test emacs too
Emacs, but recently I’m appreciating really a lot Sublime Text too: when some live distros not have Emacs that’s the alternative I prefer.