What is the lightest .txt editor (what is a clone of windows notepad)

[DuckHook]

…why the stress on crash resistance?

More than fair comment. I overemphasized crash resistance at the expense of other things.

I have had my GUI crash on me. Not indiscriminately, but it did happen regularly when I was playing one specific Steam game. However, people won't be tweaking system config files while they are gaming, so I'm getting spooked by an edge case.

Editing system files with a CLI editor is mostly a matter of good habits for me. In prior Ubuntu flavours, editing such files with sudo gedit or sudo mousepad was just asking for trouble. Canonical has since changed their sudo structure so that this danger will be reduced going forward, but I still recommend CLI editors for this reason alone.

A further reason for getting comfortable with CLI editors is remote work. But many forum members have already chimed in on this advantage, so no point repeating their advice.

[bonzini]

Windows notepad refuses to crash, and it refuses to lag. No matter how bogged down windows becomes, if you can open a notepad window than notepad will work perfectly fine.

I am searching for the Linux equivalent of windows notepad, the most light weight and lag proof text editor out there. Something that is a computerised type writer and nothing more.

I think you are looking for something that need not exist. "no matter how bogged down windows becomes" - doesn't apply here. Just use nano (easy to learn) vi (harder to learn but worth it) emacs (why Ctrl keys are down there next to the other stuff like Alt) and move on.

[ajgreeny]

My suspicion is, that if you must use a GUI text editor rather than nano (my default), and your GUI application keeps crashing, you must have problems a bit more general than simply the GUI text editor.

When I have used mousepad on my Xubuntu installation I don't think I have ever seen it crash; in fact I can't remember when i last had anything crash on this installation.

Perhaps I'm just lucky!

[mastablasta]

A further reason for getting comfortable with CLI editors is remote work. But many forum members have already chimed in on this advantage, so no point repeating their advice.

for remote server admin i use Ajenti which has a browser text editor - so GUI it is.

but only if i do more complex editing. for simple editing CLI editors are quite good. on old windows i used to use edit in CLI. i still remember edlin editor back in dos, which sucked.

[zebra2]

Hard to say what the expectations are in this thread but I've never had a problem with Gedit, but I'm a straight out of the box Ubuntu user. If decided to go back to writing code my choice would be Atom which is a pure text point and click editor that is open source and supports Windows, Linux, and IOS. It has everything a compiler enthusiast could ask for. I took a look at Mousepad just out of curiosity and it looks to have some versatile strengths also. To each his choice I suppose.

[vo-nguyen]

Maybe vi, vim, or nano is your jam.

[Tadaen_Sylvermane]

There is only 1 editor for all platforms. vi/vim.
Don't bother with any others. Vim is infinitely extensible and 1000x more efficient than any others. I've probably seen over 100 different editors in my career and use at least 20 extensively. Vim is the most pervasive, available, and efficient of all of them. I've never seen any editor beside vi on a router. It is a stripped down version, but it is still vi.

People who don't use vim have never seen vim in the hands of an expert.

Nano is a toy compared to every other editor, including notepad. May as well use cp file < rather than nano.

It's extremely frustrating to see this said. While it may be an accurate statement it is far from the correct answer. When I was first learning linux and open source this was all anyone and even any guides said. However none of them mentioned that you needed months of hands on experience and a manual to remotely make any legitimate use of it. This exact answer was one of the things that kept me from diving into the open source world for quite awhile. For basic editing a manual shouldn't be required. It should be intuitive from the start. Vi(m) is not even remotely intuitive. Especially if it's a person coming from a Windows background.

[vanadium]

Basic editing with vim can be learned in 30 minutes, just like basic editing with notepad can be learned in 30 minutes for someone that never edited a file before.

[ajgreeny]

It's extremely frustrating to see this said. While it may be an accurate statement it is far from the correct answer. When I was first learning linux and open source this was all anyone and even any guides said. However none of them mentioned that you needed months of hands on experience and a manual to remotely make any legitimate use of it. This exact answer was one of the things that kept me from diving into the open source world for quite awhile. For basic editing a manual shouldn't be required. It should be intuitive from the start. Vi(m) is not even remotely intuitive. Especially if it's a person coming from a Windows background.

Even after 16 years of using Ubuntu and Linux I agree totally with Tadaen_Sylvermane.

I have tried several times to deal with vi/vim and failed; it may be the best way for some users but it certainly has never been my experience that it is worth the hassle of learning it when there are other cli editors such as nano which are very simple to use without needing to remember, what to me were the most unlikely keyboard commands to edit, save, etc etc.

Perhaps all my uses are very simple text files and not coding etc, where maybe vi/vim have big advantages.
Not for me!

[Tadaen_Sylvermane]

I apologize. I exaggerated I admit. It's always been a sore point for me as there is nothing other than guessing until you find it. I still think a manual shouldn't be required just to save or exit, to say nothing of the insert vs option modes. That just isn't a thing windows users are aware of.