Best Text Editor in Ubuntu

[stchman]

Let's vote for the best text editor in Ubuntu.

My vote is for Geany. It's fast, feature packed, and fairly easy to use.

[CharlesA]

Bluefish or gedit ftw.

[wojox]

Vim. You should make a poll.

[pi3.1415926535...]

I like gEdit, because it has syntax highlighting, though is primarily focused on the writing, because it has a simple interface, and so can be used for most applications.

[Hur Dur]

Nano.

[3Miro]

Mousepad is ultra light, too bad the project seems dead. You should have put Leafpad on it, about as light, but still alive.

Geany is considerably heavier, but has a ton of extra features.

gEdit is like the best and worst of both.

I use Leafpad for small file editing, Geany for code, gEdit when I need to open another instance of Geany and I cannot.

In CLI mode, I use nano ...

I answered Geany since it has features others lack, but I do use a lot of editors and I think they all have their place.

[cgroza]

I personally like this one: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gecrit/
It is quite new but it is under heavy development.

[handy]

For me:

Nano from the Terminal.

Cream when I want the easy way to use vim.

Leafpad when I want a quick & light weight editor with a GUI.

[youbuntu]

How could you forget... nano? :o

LOL!

[Toafan]

To the best of my knowledge, all of the major ones (gedit, vim, emacs, kate) offer some form of syntax highlighting. Personally I prefer vim to emacs, because it has a better tutorial. But those are best for people who have reason to want/need to keep their hands on the keyboard.

Graphically, I'd say it depends. Since they offer most of the same features, I would think you should go with one designed for use with your desktop environ's resources - lighter that way.
Of course, you really should use the one that does what you need. Me, I'm learning vim since I can use it everywhere (X, CLI, windows...) and the tutorial.

Meanwhile, this thread looks like a great place to find out about other editors.

---
Are we talking literal Ubuntu (gnome) or Ubuntu-Linux in general? For gnome, I'd say gedit unless you have reason (desire to learn or experience) to use vim/emacs. Otherwise, I'd say vim because I like the tutorial better, although emacs would work just as well I suppose. They're both extensible so it really comes down to learning curve in my opinion.


All that said, I'm putting vim.


... Why do you ask?

[Legendary_Bibo]

I use Gimp for text editing, how come I don't get a choice?

[youbuntu]

I vote BlueFish for coding, Gedit and nano for others. Emacs would be on my list, could I work it out :?

[cariboo]

THis has been discussed numerous times, and it looks like a recurring topic to me. Moved to recurring.

[SeijiSensei]

I learned emacs ages ago; now I use jed (http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/). I'll open text files in Kate and do a little editing now and then, but I'm much more comfortable in a terminal session.

When I tell people here to edit a file, I suggest nano because of the built-in menus and because it's installed by default.

I couldn't vote since there was no "none of the above" option.

[Version Dependency]

Nano gets the job done and is really handy if you are already working in the terminal.

But I always install Gedit on my machine for a non-terminal-based text editor...regardless of desktop environment.

EDIT: The best part about both nano and gedit...there names are short when launching them in the terminal :D

[cgroza]

I use Gimp for text editing, how come I don't get a choice?
Wait a minute. You use GIMP for text editing? I thought that it was a tool for advanced image processing! This one is new to me!

[youbuntu]

Pretty please could you add "nano" as a poll option?

:)

[Legendary_Bibo]

Wait a minute. You use GIMP for text editing? I thought that it was a tool for advanced image processing! This one is new to me!

Pfft! You obviously don't know much about the GIMP. I can do things like write text anywhere I want and rotate it and recolor it and make it 3D, or make it animated. It's the most advanced text editor.

[ilovelinux33467]

Kate is my editor of choice

[uRock]

Pretty please could you add "nano" as a poll option?

:)
Since you said please.

[Spice Weasel]

I like ed (http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html).

[SeijiSensei]

Pfft! You obviously don't know much about the GIMP. I can do things like write text anywhere I want and rotate it and recolor it and make it 3D, or make it animated. It's the most advanced text editor.

Probably not the best choice for a fifty-page technical article with tables and graphics, though.

[rudihawk]

Probably not the best choice for a fifty-page technical article with tables and graphics, though.

Neither are any of the other options listed in the poll to be honest.

[Simian Man]

Neither are any of the other options listed in the poll to be honest.

I use vim to write all of my technical documents including presentations (with LaTeX) many of which are quite long. I have a bunch of vim macros to make this easier. My friend actually wrote his Master's thesis (100+ pages) in nano. I finally got him to switch to vim though :).

[rudihawk]

I use vim to write all of my technical documents including presentations (with LaTeX) many of which are quite long. I have a bunch of vim macros to make this easier. My friend actually wrote his Master's thesis (100+ pages) in nano. I finally got him to switch to vim though :).

I could never quite get LaTeX to work for me :(

Luckily I haven't really had a need to use it yet, as I am still an undergrad, but perhaps in the future.

[Tibuda]

GVim

[Ranko Kohime]

Gotta go with Leafpad. Just starts faster than Gedit. Also, Jedit for coding.

^ My first post using Dvorak. Mildly painful. Wish me luck. :)

[MarcusW]

Geany. :)

[benerivo]

Leafpad. I think it's a bit faster/lighter than mousepad.

[stchman]

For Ubuntu being an advanced OS, why do so many people still use an ancient editor like vi? There are so many better choices.

[Simian Man]

For Ubuntu being an advanced OS, why do so many people still use an ancient editor like vi? There are so many better choices.

Vim isn't ancient, the last release was this past August. And in terms of features, flexibility and extensibility, the only real competitor is Emacs.

[stchman]

Vim isn't ancient, the last release was this past August. And in terms of features, flexibility and extensibility, the only real competitor is Emacs.

Uh huh. That's the great thing about Linux, we can all choose to use whatever we want no matter how good(Geany) or bad(vim) it is.

[cgroza]

Gotta go with Leafpad. Just starts faster than Gedit. Also, Jedit for coding.

^ My first post using Dvorak. Mildly painful. Wish me luck. :)
Heheh, been there. Very annoying, but after a week, you will get an acceptable speed.

[Tibuda]

Uh huh. That's the great thing about Linux, we can all choose to use whatever we want no matter how good(Geany) or bad(vim) it is.

Good or bad are relatives. What is good for you is bad for someone else.

[PaulW2U]

Cream when I want the easy way to use vim.

I would have said "Cream, for when I've forgotten how to do it in vim". :D

[UndiFineD]

cat > file << EOF

[ibuclaw]

cat > file << EOF

Actually, real programmers use 'ed' ;)


(PS: I'm not a real programmer, so I use 'ex' instead)

[Random_Dude]

I use vim to write all of my technical documents including presentations (with LaTeX) many of which are quite long. I have a bunch of vim macros to make this easier. My friend actually wrote his Master's thesis (100+ pages) in nano. I finally got him to switch to vim though :).

Wow that's insane. I could never write a 100 page thesis in nano. :o
For LaTeX I use TexMakerX.

I've had a course on C programming in which I used gedit.
Recently I've tried vim and emacs (just to see what the fuss was all about). They're both pretty nice but I think I'll make an effort to learn Emacs a little more.
Vim didn't use CUA bindings and I didn't feel like running cream. Emacs has a pretty decent autocomplete plugin and supports CUA bindings.

I've also tried scribes and it's pretty nice.
If you're looking for a simple text editor that has syntax highlighting and a good autocomplete mode already built-in, I would advise you to try it out. ;)

I won't answer the poll since I've tried some of the editors on the list and never stayed with any of them for a considerable amount of time.

Cheers :cool:

[sanderella]

I like to type the original into gedit with no interference from spell checkers or grammar checkers. It's the easiest way to get all the stuff written. Then cut and paste it into OO word processor and do the checks. Finally format and paste in any charts, pics, etc.
Important to leave it for a day or two and go back and check it for final polishing. This works best for me. :)

[stchman]

I use vim to write all of my technical documents including presentations (with LaTeX) many of which are quite long. I have a bunch of vim macros to make this easier. My friend actually wrote his Master's thesis (100+ pages) in nano. I finally got him to switch to vim though :).

I would think a word processor is a MUCH better thing to write a HUGE document like that than a simple text editor.

[Simian Man]

I would think a word processor is a MUCH better thing to write a HUGE document like that than a simple text editor.

Well, you would be wrong. Using LaTeX, you separate the content from the style which means you can focus on what you are writing instead of how it may look. When you do care about how things look, you can change the settings in one place rather than all over the document. LaTeX also numbers and references sections, figures, tables, citations and so on automatically, though word processors may do this too nowadays.

Using plain text is also great because it is ultra-portable, can be edited by anyone and because tools like subversion, mercurial and git can be used to track changes and collaborate with others. Word and Google Docs have collaboration tools too, but in my experience they are not nearly so refined as the ones programmers use - plus you don't need to be connected to the web to use them. Plain text files also can't become corrupted like word processor files can be.

LaTeX also produces superior looking output compared to word processors. I would have thought word processors would have caught up by now, but for some reason they haven't. When I turned in papers, or presented slides produced with LaTeX, people would frequently ask how they look so nice.

LaTeX is widely used among people who write long, complicated documents - even those who are not especially computer savvy - because it is just better for that task. Ironically it's the short, simple documents where word processors are advantageous.


By the way, I tried Geany, and it was pretty underwhelming. It basically seems like Kate or Gedit, but with some simple autobuilding of projects going on. Unfortunately, that only worked for some toy project I made to test it, but none of the projects I actually have. It doesn't seem to do a lot of the things vim does for me like format code, use ctags, browse directories and tarballs, run in a terminal, highlight based on preprocessor commands (e.g. #if 0 as a comment), record and playback macros etc. It doesn't even do proper code completion which vim can do (though I rarely use it). Not to mention that vim's keyboard shortcuts make it way easier to jump around the document, rearrange text and so on.

Thanks, but you can keep your "advanced" editor.

[stchman]

Well, you would be wrong. Using LaTeX, you separate the content from the style which means you can focus on what you are writing instead of how it may look. When you do care about how things look, you can change the settings in one place rather than all over the document. LaTeX also numbers and references sections, figures, tables, citations and so on automatically, though word processors may do this too nowadays.

Using plain text is also great because it is ultra-portable, can be edited by anyone and because tools like subversion, mercurial and git can be used to track changes and collaborate with others. Word and Google Docs have collaboration tools too, but in my experience they are not nearly so refined as the ones programmers use - plus you don't need to be connected to the web to use them. Plain text files also can't become corrupted like word processor files can be.

LaTeX also produces superior looking output compared to word processors. I would have thought word processors would have caught up by now, but for some reason they haven't. When I turned in papers, or presented slides produced with LaTeX, people would frequently ask how they look so nice.

LaTeX is widely used among people who write long, complicated documents - even those who are not especially computer savvy - because it is just better for that task. Ironically it's the short, simple documents where word processors are advantageous.


By the way, I tried Geany, and it was pretty underwhelming. It basically seems like Kate or Gedit, but with some simple autobuilding of projects going on. Unfortunately, that only worked for some toy project I made to test it, but none of the projects I actually have. It doesn't seem to do a lot of the things vim does for me like format code, use ctags, browse directories and tarballs, run in a terminal, highlight based on preprocessor commands (e.g. #if 0 as a comment), record and playback macros etc. It doesn't even do proper code completion which vim can do (though I rarely use it). Not to mention that vim's keyboard shortcuts make it way easier to jump around the document, rearrange text and so on.

Thanks, but you can keep your "advanced" editor.

I am not familiar with LaTeX, although it sound interesting. I much prefer OO or LibreOffice word processor over M$ Word. I can see the attraction of using an ASCII text file to people that love vi/vim.

If you like vim then knock yourself out.

Maybe one day we can all aspire to be as "advanced" as you are.

[Simian Man]

If you like vim then knock yourself out.

Maybe one day we can all aspire to be as "advanced" as you are.

No offence meant. You had implied earlier that Geany is objectively better than vim, and I was just explaining that, for my purposes, it certainly isn't. If you like Geany better, that's fine, but don't pretend that's anything but your preference.

[Legendary_Bibo]

I am not familiar with LaTeX, although it sound interesting. I much prefer OO or LibreOffice word processor over M$ Word. I can see the attraction of using an ASCII text file to people that love vi/vim.

If you like vim then knock yourself out.

Maybe one day we can all aspire to be as "advanced" as you are.

*Pssst* OO's formula editor uses LaTeX, and it's not very difficult. I picked it up in like 5 minutes, and I could write my big elaborate formulas we had to memorize in Calc 3 in like a fourth of the time it would have taken to write them in MS (stop using M$) Word.

[stchman]

No offence meant. You had implied earlier that Geany is objectively better than vim, and I was just explaining that, for my purposes, it certainly isn't. If you like Geany better, that's fine, but don't pretend that's anything but your preference.

I am not worried about it. A friend of mine is a huge vim zealot and I give him a hard time about it.

LaTeX sounds very interesting. It actually appears to take all the work of formatting the document out of the equation. I can certainly attest to fighting MS Word and its formatting issues. When I switched to OO a lot of those fights went away.

[Tibuda]

So much intolerance in this thread. Just use what works best for you, but don't assume it is what would work best for everyone else.

[handy]

Cygnus Ed, is my all time favourite text editor.

Unfortunately it is still only available for the AmigaOS. It is still being developed too, it had a major rewrite for AmigaOS4 which took Cygnus Ed from v4 to v5.

It is commercial software which is most likely why it was never ported to Linux, as there exist too many good alternatives here for free. The dev's obviously didn't want to have anything to do with MS or Apple so they stayed out of those camps also.

[steve.]

There are lots of really good editors in Ubuntu.

It really depends on what you want to edit.
A few years ago gedit was my favourite.
Kate replaced gedit as my favourite for editing php on local servers but was too slow for remote ones.

When I tested them earlier Bluefish and Geany were too slow saving remote files but that has changed recently.

Bluefish was nice until I tried editing JavaScript and noticed bracket matching didn't work. As a hack I found adding //<script> to the start of JavaScript files and selected Generic HTML language mode would get bracket matching to work.
Keyboard shortcuts were handy for switching between JavaScript and Generic HTML mode.

Currently trying Geany. The latest version is reasonably fast saving remote files, has highlighting for bracket matching in JavaScript and lots of nice features for editing code.

Today I'm voting for Geany :)

[Lucradia]

Leafpad, since it's not on there.

[RJ12]

I like Sublime Text, very clean and easy (it wasn't on the poll, and there is no "other" option)

[Legendary_Bibo]

Gimp is a text editor.

[Lucradia]

I retract my original vote, QED is the best, for obvious reasons :P

[_outlawed_]

Good ol' gedit. :D