What is your favorite editor?

[MiCovran]

I like vim.
It's light and it helps me get my work done quickly. It has nice syntax and indentation features, and editing is painless for your fingers.

How about you? Please, don't post very long explanations. This is not a place for vi-emacs war. Just say what you like best at your favorite editors.

[lnostdal]

emacs .. it's got everything i need and more, and i can customize it like nothing else

edit: oh, and about the non-gui/gui thing below .. i use it in both environments .. or i access remote files via sshfs

[Shay Stephens]

I selected other as I do most of my work in bluefish, but I also use gedit on occasion. When not in a gui environment, I use nano, but that is very rare for me.

[hod139]

This is not a place for vi-emacs war.
Any time a thread starts pitting Emacs against VI you are going to get a war. You better get your flame-retardant suit out just for picking VI.

Edit: Forgot to vote. I voted gedit to be safe!

[sloggerkhan]

I think there should be separate polls for gui/non-gui editors.

For me, I use nano from command line when I have to because I mostly make 1 or 2 line edits to config files and such that way.

If I am working on java code for school, I'll probably use geany or eclipse depending on what I'm doing. (Yes, eclipse is better, but sometimes it annoys me 'cause it has too many features for a relative java noob like me.)

Once I had a class where we were supposed to do c coding from command line in vi, but I never really got the hang of it(vi), probably 'cause I was to lazy to really learn it at the time.

I have a friend who loves emacs, but I suspect he may be more attached to his special custom config files for it than he really is to the program....

[newlinux]

I used to be really big on emacs. But I went 10 years without using it and have forgotten most of what made it easy for me to use, so now I use nano and gedit most of the time.

[jimcooncat]

I like gedit, a lot. But most of the time I'm working from a shell. I haven't been able to get used to any of the non-gui editors. So I use "nano -wB" then, but I don't care for it. emacs, vi? I've tried, and can't get the swing of 'em.

And twenty years ago I used to crank right along with WordStar.

Any good options for maybe an ncurses based editor? The one with Midnight Commander is nice to use, but I've had problems with it for reasons I don't recall right now.

[jblebrun]

I'm surprised Emacs has such a low vote, so far. I think it's a really powerful editor, even though I don't use it. I am a big fan of gvim. I am convinced that emacs has the ability to be more feature rich than vim, though, ever since I saw the emacs script that shows a preview of your TeX equations in the window, as you type them. I think I like vim the best because it's so lightweight, and the commands tend to take less keystrokes.

By the way, is anyone here any good with writing vim scripts? I've been digging into the scripting API because I want to write an ftplugin that adds visual cues for Python blocks (similar to what SPE does). I can't figure out an efficient way to go about adding non-printing characters to a window, though.

[skeeterbug]

PyDev for Eclipse. You can set break points and the debug view is just awsome. It is as close to VS 2005 as I can get for Python :)

[etank]

I'm a vim user myself. Tried to use emacs and it just didn't feel right for me. It may be because I started out with vim. And now that vim has tabs it's even better.

[kalikiana]

I'm using Scite for coding. It has the usual features but on top of that syntax highlighting is better in some cases, e.g. php,css,javascript&html can be mixed without any problems. It is a one-edit-window (multiple tabs) interface without any unneeded views which I wouldn't use anyway. The only drawback is that setting it up is not exactly newbie-friendly because it is done via a textfile (in the program) - once you did that everything is fine.

[Engnome]

SciTE

[Ramses de Norre]

Vim.

[jblebrun]

I'm a vim user myself. Tried to use emacs and it just didn't feel right for me. It may be because I started out with vim. And now that vim has tabs it's even better.

Wow, how'd I miss the tabs in vim 7? Thanks for mentioning this so I could discover it!

[RedSquirrel]

vi(m).

Easy to use once you get used to it. Guaranteed to be on any UNIX system.

I think for some people there is a little "programming machismo" that goes along with using vi(m). That's not the reason I use it, of course. :)

[chipmonk010]

I use vim and gvim cuz i know how to use them...well i know enough anyway...never really tried to learn emacs cuz the learning curve for vim was steep enough but i expect its just good although i think theres more key strokes involved for commands.

I originally learned vim so i could edit files from CLI, almost guaranteed to be on any *nix and its much faster then nano but now im using it for python, messing with latex, etc.

P.S gonna have to find out more about tabs in vim.....lol didnt know they existed

[seijuro]

vim since the beginning light and does everything I need never bothered to try anything else.

[maxamillion]

gvim (vim-gtk package) ... i like a little of both worlds, old school command line text editor, and new school gui driven and this tool delivers both :)

but when I'm not in the mood to hang out in limbo i just use geany

[old_geekster]

gedit: It works well for newbies like me.

[randomnumber]

does eclipse count for what you are talking about? if not I like gedt,kate, and nan, vi. It all depends on what I am doing for witch i use.

[yabbadabbadont]

Volkswriter Deluxe (Yes, I'm old. :D)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswriter

[mrpeenut24]

I'm emacs all the way. I just can't figure out how to go from the file-edit mode to file-save/quit/etc. mode in vim (top to bottom).

[antenna]

I use vim and geany.

[runningwithscissors]

Vim, of course.

[Sunnz]

Vim. Often I need to make minor edits over SSH and vim is almost always mot appropriate.

Xcode for any real programming.

[Somenoob]

Vim user myself. I also like the GUI variant(Gvim) of it.

But I use the Eric IDE for extreme python programming.

[Somenoob]

*delete this*noob mistake...

[g8m]

Once you done kate, you dont want another anymore.....

[yabbadabbadont]

I'd like to change my vote to the old reliable, "copy con filename". Doesn't work to well on Linux though. :lol:

[runningwithscissors]

I'd like to change my vote to the old reliable, "copy con filename". Doesn't work to well on Linux though. :lol:
Yeah, but we have cat to pick up the slack, don't we?
^D

[yabbadabbadont]

Yeah, but we have cat to pick up the slack, don't we?
^D

Both beat the heck out of using edlin... :twisted:

[runningwithscissors]

Both beat the heck out of using edlin... :twisted:
a
I agree with that. nobody likes edlin!!!!11!1shift+one!
.
w post
48
q

[yabbadabbadont]

a
I agree with that. nobody likes edlin!!!!11!1shift+one!
.
w post
48
q

AHHHHHHHH! Make it stop! Make it STOOOOOOOPPPPP!!!


:lol:

[lnostdal]

Ed, man! http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

"eat flaming death" .. lol

[rplantz]

emacs .. it's got everything i need and more, and i can customize it like nothing else

I do a lot of LaTeX writing. I've installed AUCTeX and it looks quite good.

I generally like using emacs, but one of the things that I have been unable to figure out is how to make it open with a window that fits on my screen. I can easily resize the window. At an one point I had a .emacs working to that it would resize the window itself, but that took 2 - 3 seconds. I've searched and read lots of material, but I cannot find what seems like should be a simple way to change the initial window size. (I find it a bit odd that the default installation creates a window much to high for the screen.)

[lnostdal]

I do a lot of LaTeX writing. I've installed AUCTeX and it looks quite good.

I generally like using emacs, but one of the things that I have been unable to figure out is how to make it open with a window that fits on my screen. I can easily resize the window. At an one point I had a .emacs working to that it would resize the window itself, but that took 2 - 3 seconds. I've searched and read lots of material, but I cannot find what seems like should be a simple way to change the initial window size. (I find it a bit odd that the default installation creates a window much to high for the screen.)

hm, weird .. i haven't had that problem - but i've seen at least one person besides you mention it though

i'm using the package `emacs-snapshot-gtk' .. maybe that's why i'm not seeing this

[LotsOfPhil]

As a young lad I had an internship working for a computational physicist. He told me to use vi and that was that. I didn't know there was anything else.

It works great, but there is a steep learning curve. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who needed a recommendation.

[jvc26]

I just use gedit to be honest - havent really looked into many alternatives though, might look into Eclipse for java.
Il

[pichalsi]

When I did C programming I used Kate, mostly for its integrated terminal window. Now for Java I use Eclipse...

[Henry Rayker]

I use many different editors...
Gedit for really light work (PERL scripts etc.)
nano for when I'm not in a GUI environment
Eclipse for Java (I just like the IDE to warn me about errors and stuff before I compile)

[Wybiral]

Gedit... It's small, simple, and extendable. It has syntax highlighting, great plugins for tab/untab, comment/uncomment, and an embedded terminal. It's also very plain a visually appealing (too many esoteric buttons and options annoy me)

[fatsheep]

Gedit is great for viewing text files but for programming VIM is simply the best.

[rplantz]

hm, weird .. i haven't had that problem - but i've seen at least one person besides you mention it though

i'm using the package `emacs-snapshot-gtk' .. maybe that's why i'm not seeing this

Thank you for your comment. Using synaptic, I completely removed my emacs. I also deleted my ~/.emacs file and deleted the emacs-related things from ~/.Xresources.

I then did a sudo updatedb and rebooted. I know. This probably wasn't necessary, but it's an old habit. I like to start with a "clean slate." Rebooting has solved more problems for me than any other single action. :)

Then I installed emacs-snapshot-gtk and I have an initial emacs window that fits very nicely on my screen.

[Ptero-4]

I use Mousepad for GUI and nano for CLI.

[rolando2424]

I use VIM or Gedit... It depends on the mood :D

But it's most Gedit

[n00bish]

I'm a vim user as well - I'm not comfortable with emacs. I like how vim feels "light" to me, but also has a lot of power when you need it.

[nephish]

i am a one week veteran of vim. Just went through vimtutor twice and i just like it a lot. It and cream are quickly replacing everything else. I bet i will still use JEdit for my bigger projects, but this thing is really fun to use.

[euler_fan]

I use Cream (based on GVim) when in gui because, well, it is easy for me to use and get into (no need to learn a lot of keyboard commands) and it has plenty of syntax highlighting. I use it to write R commands before executing them.

When not in Gui, I use nano.

I have tried emacs, and it seems pretty good but hard to learn, or maybe I should say get good with. I might put in the time if only to mess with ESS (emacs speak statistics) and a few other such features.

When my uni forces me to learn a little Java I'll probably use geany.

[MonsterCake]

I use SciTE. It's probably the best editor in my opinion.
It supports languages like C/C++, assembler, and tons more.

[Rizado]

I use kate in a graphical environment, it's just so ridiculously good. When I'm forced to use windows I use bluej, as programming java is the only time I edit anything on windows.

When not on X I use vim. It's quite good I guess but I like being able to copy and jump around alot (Which I'm pretty sure you can do in vim too). Have tried nano a few times and that only resulted in screwing files up in one way or another. Can't even figure out how to turn it off :(

[tho]

Long-time vi/vim fanboy myself, but have been messing around with Scribes (http://scribes.sf.net) lately. It's a simple, yet featurerich editor and is well integrated with GNOME.

[treak007]

vim, plain and simple. Do one thing and do it well.

[Sunnz]

I

I have tried emacs, and it seems pretty good but hard to learn, or maybe I should say get good with. I might put in the time if only to mess with ESS (emacs speak statistics) and a few other such features.Try this at home:

As soon as you have emacs opened, press `esc-x`, then type in `doctor`. :D

[Poisson_Pilote]

For Python, I use Dr Python.

For Bash, I usually use either Gedit or Nano.

When coding in C/C++, I definitely use nano in a shell, with several tabs open: one with gdb, one with gcc, etc.

Even though I don't code in PHP/HTML anymore, I used to use Notepad++ on Windows- it's a quite good editor.

My favorite editor in console is Nano: light, very handy shortcuts, easily customable. I tried emacs, but I'm repelled by its 9000 functionalities and keyboard shortcuts.

[picpak]

I voted Other, for Mousepad. But I'll use nano either when I'm in the terminal or when I want pretty colors.

[Sunnz]

I voted Other, for Mousepad. But I'll use nano either when I'm in the terminal or when I want pretty colors.
Does Mousepad has syntax highlighting?

[s1ightcrazed]

winepad (just kidding!!)

Where are the pico fans? Rarely am I *coding* remotely, so vim or emacs seems like overkill . Pico works fine if all I'm doing are system admin tasks via ssh. If I'm coding, I prefer Kate.

Polls like this are kind of silly though. Might as well ask 'democrat or republican', although I doubt there is the same flame potential as 'vi or emacs'. I mean honestly, to each his own.

[virx]

Does your favorite editor support brackets autocomplete feature?

When I type "(", then ")" will be automatically added and cursor moves between brackets, so i couldn't forget ending functions etc.

[nephish]

lots of editors do bracket completion
vim does through a script, gedit through a plugin, scribes out of the box.

[MiCovran]

Does your favorite editor support brackets autocomplete feature?

When I type "(", then ")" will be automatically added and cursor moves between brackets, so i couldn't forget ending functions etc.
I never used this feature, and I don't think I would like it. I prefer automatic indentation: open the bracket, indent gets increased; close the bracket, indent gets decreased.
With automatic brackets, I would have to move cursor to the right later and I don't like the sound of it. But that's just my opinion. Glad to see there are editors for everyones taste. :)

[nephish]

some editors ( like the vim script and scribes ) will allow you to type over the closing bracket. It is smart enough to know when you want to type one and when not. This is so that your program flow isn't interrupted and you don't have to space across the auto inserted bracket. pretty cool.

[wolfbone]

With automatic brackets, I would have to move cursor to the right later and I don't like the sound of it.

That would be a nuisance but I'd be surprised if any editor's auto-bracketing worked like that. In paredit mode in emacs, for example, you type a left bracket and it does put the matching bracket in, but you carry on as if it hadn't and when you type the closing bracket, it moves point past the one already there and inserts newlines and indentation as appropriate.

Of course no editor should force any feature on you and a really good editor allows you to customize its behaviour in great detail.

[Acglaphotis]

Vim rocks!

[virx]

Thank you for your answeres.
Sry didn't notice that topic was ment mainly about text editors and not programming editors.
In screenshots scribes looks nice and clean. Vim is text-based program, u guys really use it in X environment? In console I preferre nano - it's not with as advanced options as vi(m), but has all features I need.

[Acglaphotis]

Yeah, but some people use Gvim, but i prefer to use it in a terminal. With #000000 background and green font.

[abstractcoder]

gedit because it looks cute, Although Vim is nice too,

[Majorix]

Others I haven't used much but Gedit is awesome.

[blakecraw]

I really like emacs, as long as I have caps lock functioning as a ctrl key. I find the various commands very fast and easy to use, and I tried vim since it gets so much praise but couldn't get used to the clunky modes. Besides, it's nice having two os's around in case ubuntu fails :)

[MiCovran]

you type a left bracket and it does put the matching bracket in, but you carry on as if it hadn't and when you type the closing bracket, it moves point past the one already there and inserts newlines and indentation as appropriate.
Very nice. I didn't look at it that way. And nephish said vim has this function too (if I understood correctly). How can I get it running?

[RIchard James13]

I use JED in the console but these days I'll use any editor as long as it does what I want it to.

[jeffus_il]

I use Vi(m), I'm surprised to see how popular it is!
It seems primitive compared to all the fancy stuff around.
Thought I was a caveman, Seems like there are other cavemen around.


Real Men use Vi

:-$

[wolfbone]

Very nice. I didn't look at it that way. And nephish said vim has this function too (if I understood correctly). How can I get it running?

I don't use balancing parenthesis modes other than paredit (lisp only AFAIK) but there's at least one such mode here, among some other parenthesis stuff, if you want it:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CategoryParentheses

Automatic indentation and newline for C-like major modes are covered by electric mode which is part of vanilla emacs and you should find them toggleable with C-c C-l, C-c C-a resp. or by clicking on things in menus.

[wolfbone]

I use Vi(m), I'm surprised to see how popular it is!
It seems primitive compared to all the fancy stuff around.
Thought I was a caveman, Seems like there are other cavemen around.


Vim and Emacs are deliberately made to seem primitive to keep out the riff-raff.

[SeanHodges]

Fairly recent Vim convert (been using it for about a year), I love it!

In fact, just today I found some scripts to help with code refactoring:

http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=589


I love the fact I can get Vim to do anything, but at the same time I can still use it comfortably without my profile.

I use it for programming in Python, C++, in fact doing pretty much all my text editing except when coding in Java (I still prefer Eclipse for this).

[mali2297]

I use Emacs+AUCTeX for LaTeX editing. For other tasks, I have recently found JOE, it is lighter than Emacs but have the same basic features (search/replace, kill/yank etc). If you start it with the command jmacs, it emulates Emacs' key bindings.

[ingvildr]

Emacs for sure, I use it for developing in python and pretty much everything else ;)

[scizzo]

Vim and geany...

[jeffus_il]

The average age of the different groups would be very interesting... (I must have primary fever)

[hanniph]

I enjoy gedit but hate those ~backup files it lefts

[LaRoza]

I enjoy gedit but hate those ~backup files it lefts

You can get rid of them in Edit-Preferences

[Sockerdrickan]

I love Gedit with all of my nerd heart.

[Medieval_Creations]

I tend to use pico, but vi is a close 2nd.

[Phrawm48]

I like to use vim because doing so makes me better at it, and that means I'll almost always be able to edit files on virtually any *ix system even without a desktop manager / GUI.

I found out about geany from this thread, installed it, and it looks really nice. So I'll probably be using it to work on scripts, etc.

I use gedit mostly when I want to do some quick copy-and-pastes of text to/from the Gnome clipboard. I still can't do that in vim without a lot of clumsiness (although it's not very hard at all with gvim)...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Ric
SFO

[naugiedoggie]

I do a lot of LaTeX writing. I've installed AUCTeX and it looks quite good.

I generally like using emacs, but one of the things that I have been unable to figure out is how to make it open with a window that fits on my screen. I can easily resize the window. At an one point I had a .emacs working to that it would resize the window itself, but that took 2 - 3 seconds. I've searched and read lots of material, but I cannot find what seems like should be a simple way to change the initial window size. (I find it a bit odd that the default installation creates a window much to high for the screen.)

Hello,

You can probably find the answer to the question about setting window size here: Set emacs window size (http://linux.about.com/od/emacs_doc/a/emacsdoc560.htm).

The issue with windows being created that don't "line up" with your video display is more complex. Usually, it's a misalignment between where the opening application thinks the edge of your window is located and where you actually see it. The most frequent demonstration of this is where you drag your mouse pointer to the edge of the screen and it disappears from view. The X windowing system uses the concept of a "viewport," which is what you are setting when you set something like 1024x768 for "screen resolution." I for many years used a desktop of 1280x1024 with a viewport of 1024x768, meaning that my desktop was way bigger than my view, and allowing me to push the viewport vertically and horizontally to view different portions of the desktop. This allowed me to keep open multiple applications without having them overlap.

You can also have default settings for the Windowing system that make assumptions about your screen resolution that aren't true in a particular case. If you have a wide-screen display for example, the video settings probably would not be configured for it OOB and it would look distorted.

It can be extremely annoying when a window gets its title bar pushed off the top of the screen and you can't get it back and it's one of those applications that remembers its last position, so it always reopens in the same wrong place. ;-)

Thanks.

mp

[rzrgenesys187]

I generally use vi but geany is nice for html since it closes your tags for you.

[z-vap]

I currently use gedit because I haven't found the editor that can emulate the grepping search capabilities of PSPAD.

I simply love the fact that it copies whatever I am searching for to a second tabbed-window. Any linux gui based editors do that?

[naugiedoggie]

I have been using emacs for over 10 years. My reasons:

* gnus. I can't count the number of news readers I've tested and I always end up coming back to this one. It must be that good.
* remote file edit. Using either ftp or ssh, I can edit files on remote systems, in place. I've found this very handy for maintaining web sites.
* internal shell. When I'm testing a script or small CL app, I don't have to go back and forth between two windows. In addition, when I need to use the output of a command in something I'm editing, the output is right there in the editor.
* compiler hooks. Run your compiler within the editor and jump to error lines from within the compiler output buffer -- hey! It's an IDE!
* dynamic templates. Instead of having template files, you can dynamically template files at the point of creation, which allows you to generate information in the new files based on current conditions.
* complete customization. Keymap, color, everything.
* JDEE to make it a complete Java IDE.
* cc-mode to completely customize syntactical behavior and formatting.
* cperl-mode which practically makes it into a perl IDE.
* what I might call "controlled misbehavior" that tells you if you've made a syntax error in your code. e.g., if you forget a closing parenthesis in your code, the autoindentation stops working. Right away, you know you've bunged up something, go fix it. No more reams of compiler errors because you forgot a semicolon.
* "electric" braces and auto-newline, put you where you want to be 99% of the time when coding. You almost never have to reformat your code or touch the <tab> key. (oh yeah, and the <tab> key reindents a line of code no matter where in the line the cursor is located -- i.e., you don't have to be at the beginning of the line. <tab> reindents in or out, "does the right thing" to get the code properly lined up. I'm so used to this feature that I frequently try this trick in other editors -- it doesn't work!)

Thanks.

mp

[Lster]

Gedit. It does everything I need and it's fast! :)

[silver-city-productions]

ScITE

have used Bluefish, and it was pretty good. The problem was that in my work environment I do not have a desktop linux, so had to find an editor that ran on the (Other) platform

[isbiyanto]

i use "gedit" :)

[sidzen]

mcedit -- it's easy

[lisati]

nano when using SSH, otherwise gedit.

[NightwishFan]

I also use nano to do anything with configuration files. Gedit for python and html. I used to use kate, if anything it has too many features for me in a GUI program.

[matthew.ball]

Have you guys heard that old mantra "learn one editor, and learn it well"? :p