Fresh view of text editors – command and graphical variations

[Brian MasinickModerator]

We’ve had at least two topics about text editors in the past:

1) http://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/list-of-light-text-editors-maybe-mousepad-could-be-the-2nd-antix-text-editor/ – from a couple of years ago.

In this one, we concluded that Mousepad, though it “runs well”, it brings in too many packages, and according to @anticapitalista, it’s too big!

2) http://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/command-line-text-editors/

In this one we looked at command line text editors. At the time, I had some “problems” with helix that have since been resolved.

I’ve also worked with several other editors. One that I’ve used for months that I enjoy very much is “xnedit”. This is a refactored version of a text editor released back in the 1990s on multiple operating systems. Users often called it “Nirvana” because it was super easy. Turns out that xnedit is a modern, updated version of nedit. I recommend it highly.

3) https://linuxblog.io/50-linux-text-editors/
is the site I’ve been using recently to evaluate as many text editors as possible. Quite a few of them work VERY well, and now that there are some “preconfigured” versions of editors, many of which now offer AppImage format, this makes more of them easy to access, download and install in minutes.

Believe me, I’ve gone through a LOT of these editors. For our audience, there are a few people who MIGHT enjoy going through the list at this third reference, but for the REST of us, I recommend these two:

a) Nano – as configured by @anticapitalista; his configuration adds colors for various elements, so in scripts and programs, if you use his customizations, they look and perform very well. For very simple changes to small files, this is still hard to beat.

b) Geany – even though I like my “Nirvana”, there’s no reason for the average person to avoid using Geany. Only hard core developers might look further.

Okay, now that this backdrop has been mentioned, TWO modal editors, helix and “Kakoune code editor
Modal editor · Faster as in fewer keystrokes · Multiple selections · Orthogonal design”. I had to compile Kakoune, but all it takes is to either download the image using git or zip. I used zip, so I just unzipped the file, typed make, and let it compile; when complete, just type ./src/kak to run it; I copied that image to my ~bin directory by using ln -sf ./src/kak ~/bin/kak.

Comparing helix and Kakoune, they do ALMOST the same thing; Kakoune has the most modern appearance items, similar to the advancements of Neovim over Gvim and Spacemacs over GNU Emacs – both of which I ALSO have installed.

Sublime has an “optional” “distraction-free” mode; this puts the editor into full screen display, regardless of what it’s visual window was using before; this setting can be enabled or disabled.

“Why Pulsar?

There are a lot of text editors out there; why should you spend your time learning about and using Pulsar? Editors like Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren’t very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

We think we can do better. Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability: an editor that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won’t outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.

As we’ve used Pulsar to build Pulsar, what began as an experiment has gradually matured into a tool we can’t live without. On the surface, Pulsar is the modern desktop text editor you’ve come to expect. Pop the hood, however, and you’ll discover a system begging to be hacked on.”

At another “extreme”: “Dit: A simple and minimalist text editor written in Lua for fast editing tasks.” This one is “relatively light and simple”, but doesn’t have a lot of documentation to guide you, especially compared to Pulsar!

At the END of the 3) list, “Zed: A collaborative, fast, and modern code (and text) editor designed for developers.” This one you can optionally open a modal mode similar to vim, but this is a more modern implementation.

Speaking of vi and vim, “Neovim: Extensible fork of Vim with modern UI and improved performance.” this is the current implementation of the “vi” of today; helix is a modal variation that uses the VERB command component first, and the modifiers follow the verb.

I did also install Visual Studio Code; it is a powerful editor that 15-20 million developers use, for whatever that’s worth. I don’t “need it”, but I did find that it is indeed a clean and powerful editor, a LOT better than many OTHER applications created by that software company in the northwest corner of the USA! 🙂

For the HUGE EDITOR fan, the “50 Linux Text Editors You Should Know About” is the #1 geek article about text editors that I’ve seen that is up to date, and includes both the old classics and the latest experimental editing tools.

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

Oh WOW, I just noticed that this article MISSED on including xnedit! I’ll see if I can contact them!

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

Brian Masinick wrote:

Oh WOW, I just noticed that this article MISSED on including xnedit! I’ll see if I can contact them!

I DID contact their notes on the 50 text editors and brought up BOTH the OLD “nedit”, known as “Nirvana”, and the much more up to date version 1.6.1 of xnedit. I wonder if there will be a response to my comments?

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

From https://linuxblog.io/50-linux-text-editors/
I was FINALLY able to build the FIRST text editor on the list – amp.

I didn’t want to take a chance, because it appeared to “attempt” to pull in code from other “sources”.
At first I used the method of obtaining the code using zip, then unzip. The direct documentation did not provide me with enough information.

When I DID search and locate information on building the amp binary image for Linux, I learned that it wanted to FIRST build rust, then it wanted to build cargo, and from there it built amp.

To do this, I didn’t want to pollute antiX any more than I’ve done in the past, so I chose MX Linux as my platform to build the editor. When I built cargo it attempted to bring in some *wayland components; I didn’t immediately determine whether it was straight Wayland or just some Xwayland components, but they looked suspicious.

It’s too bad, because once it’s all imported, amp is a fast and efficient text editor, again using a modal input model like vi. The image itself is small – that’s because it requires the installation of so many additional components: rust, cargo, and all of the libraries that each of them bring in.

More than ever, these supposedly “efficient” text editors demonstrate that there are many other much smaller infrastructures associated with the editors we choose to include in our collection.

While I do enjoy experimenting with these editors, and because I have the time, speed, and space on my system to install other distributions so that I can test without polluting antiX more than I have, past or present, I’ll say it again: as much as I enjoy these experiments, unless you already HAVE these “built up” environments (maybe Slackware CURRENT or Endeavour OS would have been more appropriate starting points), at least I have a Debian – based environment where I can conduct further experiments.

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ANOTHER editor that I failed to correctly download and install earlier was ANOTHER Rust based editor, lapce.

https://trendoceans.com/lapce-code-editor/ gave me a clean, clear way to install lapce; what I was missing was that lapce has to run from a privileged directory; I chose /usr/local/bin rather than the /usr/bin recommended in the article; then it worked fine; again, I did this on MX Linux instead of antiX to avoid any undesirable code inserted into my antiX environments.

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Yesterday I pulled out my old Lenovo Thinkpad X201. I checked and I didn’t add very many extra text editors on this system so I added a few.

One of them, zed, brought up the outline of the edit window.

I also installed GNU Emacs and it worked so I added Spacemacs to the configuration and that also worked but something else happened: the system became very hot.

I turned off the system for a few minutes, then tried zed again and noticed it also was heating up the ACPI components, same as was happening with GNU Emacs, so I have come to the conclusion that several of these latest fancy text editors are unsuitable for this model because it does have a tendency to run warm. With modern software it runs HOT!

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

Brian Masinick wrote:

Yesterday I pulled out my old Lenovo Thinkpad X201. I checked and I didn’t add very many extra text editors on this system so I added a few.

One of them, zed, brought up the outline of the edit window.

I also installed GNU Emacs and it worked so I added Spacemacs to the configuration and that also worked but something else happened: the system became very hot.

I turned off the system for a few minutes, then tried zed again and noticed it also was heating up the ACPI components, same as was happening with GNU Emacs, so I have come to the conclusion that several of these latest fancy text editors are unsuitable for this model because it does have a tendency to run warm. With modern software it runs HOT!

I pulled up my Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i instead of the older Lenovo Thinkpad X201, tried running a few of the same apps and the results are much better, much cooler and much faster.

I STILL LOVE the Thinkpad models; if I can find a more recent one at an affordable price that *could* be a future system, but probably not soon. Nothing at all wrong with the stuff I am using now.

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@sybok was having difficulty posting in here for some reason, and sent this note to share with us:

“I have very fond memories of one particular model I happen to own.
An old small ThinkPad Edge 145 bought more than a decade ago when I was traveling a lot at an earlier job.
The netbook has 3.6(?) GB RAM and it still works, but one has to manage it carefully since its joints connecting the body to the display are slightly broken.
System is slow (HDD), Windows are barely usable, but XFCE (requested by the current user) is manageable; starting and using modern non-text-based browsers can be PITA if you are accustomed to many tabs being opened.
I will miss the trackpad 🙁 in new Lenovo models, if I buy any.

BTW, a forum on a general SW, mostly Linux news, mentioned modular notebooks https://frame.work .
I consider them to be an intriguing alternative to ultra-thin with all-we-can-soldered on MoBo models.”

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

https://linuxblog.io/50-linux-text-editors/

I currently have the following installed on at least one of my systems:

Amp
Dit
Ed
Emacs
ex
Featherpad
Geany
Helix
Jed
Jedit
JOVE
Jupp
Kakoune
Lapce
Leafpad
Lite-xl
medit
Micro
Mousepad
Nano
ne
Neovim
Notepad++ (last time I used it was on Windows in my final job)
Notepadqq
Notepad-Next
Pulsar
ScITE
Sublime Text
Tea Text Editor
Textadept
Tilde
vi
Vile
Vim
Visual Studio Code
Zed

I’ve also used Kate, Gedit, XEmacs, Bluefish, Cudatext, GNOME Text Editor, Kwrite, Cream
levee, mg, and a few others not listed, including nedit, xnedit, plus some “weird” editors
like teco, and I’ve been stuck with edlin and a few other editors on Microsoft and IBM systems,
so that means I’ve used whatever they had available; of course I’ve used ISPF on mainframes.
As well as GNU Emacs and XEmacs, I’ve also used Gosling Emacs and qemacs – qemacs is installed now.

There are probably at least 5-10 additional editors that I’ve used at some point in time,
so I’d say I’m extremely familiar with text editors!

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[sybokMember]

I wonder… Would periodically switching among them (and the different shortcuts) keep ones mind fresh or distract-to-destruct it?
Reminds me how I used M$ Office at work and after a mistake, my first instinct was to press Esc+u which, obviously, did not work.

[Brian MasinickModerator]

I don’t know if I’ll ever have to touch a system using Windows ever again, now that I’m retired.
If I ever tire of messing around with my Linux distributions, I will say that our Chromebooks have given us surprisingly good access to many things and I could care less about who does or does not poke into my online activity. I am not a criminal, nor do I have hurtful or harmful thoughts or actions toward others, so what brand or model of whatever I use is of no consequence except for my hobby interest.

Among the things I downloaded was Visual Studio Code. One of my friends back in Nashua, NH who used to be a very good developer had worked at Digital and joined BEA systems, one of the early companies involved in enterprise infrastructure software products. He found Visual Studio Code to be an excellent development platform, particularly after joining BEA. It’s been a multi platform editor and development platform for a long time, and I found that it works well on antiX, though there is nothing I particularly “need” in it at this point. Nevertheless I can see the development tool values it contains and the surprising openness in the many systems where it works.

Many of the newer editors offer numerous themes to allow people to have various light and dark backgrounds coupled with complementary color schemes. A couple of the vi variations do this reasonably efficiently – Vim (now dormant because of the passing of its founder) and Neovim, which actually came out ten years ago and has been gradually improving. Neovim numbers the version in the 0.10 release; I’ve seen changes up to 0.10.4; I see no technical reason that it can’t be a number greater than one, other that the reasons the developers have chosen. Neovim, called nvim when you start it, has a command interface and a nvim-qt interface. The old Lenovo had no problems running it, so it passes that test.

You can see the extensive list of editors; the ones I listed one at a time work on some Linux distribution on my every day system; most, except for the ones associated with desktop environments, run fine on antiX.

Spacemacs, a configuration of GNU Emacs, is somewhat of a merge between the various vi-vim modes in Emacs and a rewrite to reduce the number of superfluous modes and packages that users have to build or customize. It also introduces the use of the space bar to access the overall environment instead of the complex, and finger challenges key mappings of the original GNU Emacs. Notice that it does not replace GNU Emacs; instead it is built upon GNU Emacs, and it also allows you to toggle between the use of a mostly traditional Emacs and the vi and space key implementation of Emacs; the motivations were to reduce finger stress and make the modes and packages more efficient. Mind you, Spacemacs is NOT lean and it doesn’t run well on old systems; for that, use either a basic GNU Emacs, NOT full of customizations, or use an alternative like mg or qemacs to get reasonably good performance with traditional Emacs keystrokes, e3 in e3em mode to get a very small, fast editor, or Joe-jupp and jupp to get the jmacs Emacs keystrokes in a slightly more capable fast editor.

levee is a super small subset of vi if you have a really old computer, know vi and just want fast; then again, e3 can do all of that; nano is a fairly light command editor and our antiX customizations are very good, and geany is a small, fast integrated development environment for antiX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors describes many editors and which environments they are used. The reference with the “50 editors” was written during the past year, so it’s fairly current in its coverage of what still works.

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If you lean to the small, simple, and efficient end, these three editors ought to provide anything reasonable:
1) e3 is the smallest command editor out there – ls e3*
e3 e3em e3ne e3pi e3vi e3ws – e3em is a tiny emulation of the basic emacs keystrokes, e3ne is a minimal setup patterned somewhat like nedit, e3pi is like pico and nano, and e3ws is similar in keystrokes to Wordstar.

2) nano is a simple command editor and antiX has customized the colors to highlight keywords when various file types are used.

3) geany is a graphical based integrated text editor, useful for common development.

Unless you have advanced requirements, one of these three will get the job done just fine! I’ve used them all successfully.

That said, I’ve pulled in a recent version of an nedit replacement, xnedit and it is great for routine editing; I use it to update my ~/.icewm/toolbar every time I change a browser, such as a new Ungoogled Chromium (like TODAY) or anything else I want to modify on my toolbar; it’s quite handy for such things.
[the three alternatives above would work too; I just like xnedit].

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For those interested there is a new Version 1.6.2 of the xnedit text editor in AppImage format.
To give you an idea what xnedit is like, it’s similar to Notepad++ on Windows and notepadqq
on Linux, and it’s a refactored version of the once popular multi-platform editor, Nedit,
once known as “Nirvana”. Needless to say it’s a very good editor and it works great on
antiX; I just installed it and have it already on two of my antiX systems and I’ve verified
it.

Also, I keep the xnc and xnedit instances of xnedit; I found that copying the new AppImage over
the xnedit, in effect moving the new AppImage name to xnedit, the xnc instance picks up the new
version. The thing I like about the xnc instance is that I can start up the editor without
having to background and/or redirecting the editor image. I’ve said before that this is a good
every day kind of editor for routine tasks. https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit is where you can
get it.

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I was doing some reading about text editors and as you might guess, if you have ever explored this area, there is very little agreement about them, particularly about the classics – the model editors compared to the straight typing editors.

Looking at what WE offer, usually STANDARD, at least in a full implementation, antiX almost always includes these two: nano as a very simple console terminal editor, which means you can use it whether you have a graphical interface enabled or not. I’ve looked at our antiX implementation of nano, and IF you have a color enabled terminal and you have your terminal type set to accept various colors, nano actually looks pretty decent. It is also possible to alter the command or control sequences which I sometimes do, but it works fine whether you do that or not, so it is a good editor to have for those times when the graphical environment is either not working or you simply want to do a few quick edits. I would not necessarily recommend it for all day long editing, but it IS customizable enough that I suppose that’s possible.

Geany is a great tool. For some it’s enough to use as a primary editor; it’s lean, responsive, and quite functional as a developer’s editor. but easy enough to use that when you have a graphical environment present (screens and visual windows), it’s enough for all but the discriminating developer or writer.

I mentioned Xnedit, which the MX Linux project has included, though newer versions are available; last I looked, their version was 1.5.0. I’ve updated mine a few times; I got Verion 1.6, but recently I’ve seen and added Version 1.6.2.

Where this editor is handy is mostly for undistracted typing, but the editing fanatic may be pleased to know that it has some pretty good find, search, and replace capabilities, and I’ve found this useful, even with the background to use either Vi or Emacs style search and replace methods, so if you fool around with such things, I’ve found that I can install it easily. The other day I installed it on a system and at first it was “complaining” about FUSE library calls, and I thought, “Oh boy, here we go again, but then I found that I was able to extract an AppImage format of Xnedit into a squash directory, and from there, extract both the xnc and Xnedit versions of the program, copy them into my personal ~/bin directory, where I keep my personally installed programs, and that was the end of my short-lived “problem” and both xnc and xnedit images work great.

One final note: a lot of times I call up various editors from the command line but then they “tie up” my console until I close them or open another terminal tab or separate terminal window. Well, being somewhat of a “minimalist”, not wanting fifty programs running wild at once, I have a small, well managed organization of things to run. Sure, I’ll run additional things for a few minutes, but I rarely keep more than 3-4 things that I’ve started up myself running concurrently. My handy null.bash script allows me to start detached programs when needed so I don’t need too many terminal emulators or lots of tabs running; again, though my newer systems can handle it, this practice allows me to move on to older, slower systems without having to do everything completely differently, so this kind of personal use case works for me, particularly on my OLD hardware.

BTW I composed this on SIX year old hardware – a Chromebook; it’s more “proprietary” than antiX, but I believe in “choices”, and this choice is another solid, change of pace alternative to my beloved antiX setup.

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https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-configuration-frameworks-emacs/

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