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From: Whirled.Peas on 19 Jul 2010 09:00
The Linux Ware Weekly #22

Welcome to the Linux Ware Weekly, a series of posts intended to introduce
Linux users to software they may find useful for completing their various
tasks. Each week I plan to bring you a list of applications that are
suited to a certain task. I don't guarantee that the lists will be
exhaustive by any stretch. In fact I can guarantee that I will probably
overlook several applications since there are so many different programs
written for Linux and forks upon forks of the popular ones.

This week's LWW will be the final weekly edition. If time and real life
allows, I may post a few more on a more sporadic schedule. I hope this
series has, in some small way, been helpful.

This week we are looking at text editors. Perhaps no other type of
program generates as much loyalty and spirited discussion as one's
favorite / best text editor among the plethora of choices you find in
Linux. The discussion of the various strengths and weaknesses of vi and
emacs borders on religious fervor.

We will look at just a few, let me stress that, JUST A FEW text editors,
both of the GUI and CLI varieties.

I am ignoring Kate and Gedit because they are the defaults for KDE and
Gnome respectively.



GUI Text Editors

Geany
Homepage: http://www.geany.org/
Geany is a small C editor using GTK2 with basic features of an integrated
development environment. It features syntax highlighting, code
completion, call tips, many supported filetypes (including C, Java, PHP,
HTML, DocBook, Perl, LateX, and Bash), and symbol lists.


Cream
Homepage: http://cream.sourceforge.net/
Cream is a configuration of the famous Vim text editor that makes it
easier to use, like an Apple- or Windows-style text editor. It uses Vim's
own extensibility to improve menus, keyboard shortcuts, and editing
behavior. Cream seamlessly maintains Vim's insertmode to access all the
power of the original Vim plus many custom Cream extensions.


Jedit
Homepage: http://www.jedit.org/
jEdit is an Open Source text editor written in Java. It has many useful
features, such as syntax highlighting, bracket matching, regular
expression searching, multiple file search and replace, folding, and
keyboard macros. jEdit also includes a powerful plugin architecture that
allows more than 80 plugins to be downloaded and installed from within
the editor.


SciTE
Homepage: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
SciTE is a GUI-based single-document editor which uses the Scintilla
editor component. It rapidly styles most common programming languages
with good control over how syntactic elements are displayed, and features
folding for C++, C, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Styling of HTML also
styles embedded scripts written in VBScript, Javascript, or Python.



medit
Homepage: http://mooedit.sourceforge.net/
Medit is a small and fast graphical text editor.

Leafpad
Homepage: http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/
Leafpad is a GTK+ based text editor that emphasizes simplicity. As
development focuses on keeping weight down to a minimum, only the most
essential features are implemented in the editor. Leafpad is simple to
use, is easily compiled, requires few libraries, and starts up quickly.




CLI Text Editors

vi(m)
Homepage (for vim): http://www.vim.org/
Vi (visual) is a display oriented text editor based on ex. Ex and vi run
the same code; it is possible to get to the command mode of ex from
within vi and vice-versa.

The view command is identical to vi except that files are opened read-

only. The vedit command is also identical, but sets some options to
values more useful for novices.

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the
editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set.
This editor is very useful for editing programs and other plain ASCII
files. All commands are given with normal keyboard characters, so those
who can type with ten fingers can work very fast.  Additionally, function
keys can be defined by the user, and the mouse can be used.
Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and is so useful for
programming that many consider it to be an entire Integrated Development
Environment.  However, this application is not only intended for
programmers.  Vim is highly regarded for all kinds of text editing, from
composing email to editing configuration files.
Vim's interface is based on commands given in a text user interface.
Although its graphical user interface, gVim, adds menus and toolbars for
commonly used commands, the software's entire functionality is still
reliant on its command line mode.



Emacs
Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display
editor. Emacs has special code editing modes, a scripting language
(elisp), and comes with many packages for doing mail, news and more, all
in your editor.
Emacs is a highly advanced text editor, providing users with much more
than simple insertion and deletion. This large, complex application does
everything from editing text to functioning as a complete development
environment.
It can control subprocesses, indent programs automatically, show two or
more files at once, and edit formatted text. Emacs editing commands
operate in terms of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and
pages, as well as expressions and comments in various programming
languages.
The software has been in development for approximately 32 years.



Nano
Homepage: http://nano-editor.org/
nano is a small, free and friendly editor which aims to replace Pico, the
default editor included in the non-free Pine package. Rather than just
copying Pico's look and feel, nano also implements some missing (or
disabled by default) features in Pico, such as "search and replace" and
"go to line and column number".
nano is a curses-based text editor. It is a clone of Pico, the editor of
the Pine email client.
The nano project was started in 1999 due to licensing issues with the
Pine suite (Pine was not distributed under a free software license), and
also because Pico lacked some essential features.
nano aims to emulate the functionality and easy-to-use interface of Pico,
while offering additional functionality, but without the tight mailer
integration of the Pine/Pico package.
nano, like Pico, is keyboard-oriented, controlled with control keys.



e3
Homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/e3editor/
e3 is a full-screen, user-friendly text editor with an interface similar
to that of either WordStar, Emacs, Pico, Nedit, or vi. It's heavily
optimized for size and independent of libc or any other libraries, making
it useful for mini-Linux distributions and rescue disks. The assembler
version supports Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Win9x, QNX, Atheos,
BeOS, ELKS, and DOS. There is also a separately distributed version
written in C which supports some other Unix versions and CygWin. It is
also possible to use regular expressions by using child processes like
sed. e3 has a built in arithmetic calculator.



Tickle Text
Homepage: http://www.baldwinsoftware.com/tcltext.html
Tickle Text is a fast, lightweight text editor with a vast array of
features for editing code (such as templates for Tcl, Perl, Python, HTML,
and LaTeX and the ability to open various shells), moving scripts and Web
pages to or from your server with FTP, exporting to PDF, writing LaTeX,
posting to LiveJournal, and more


ne
Homepage: http://ne.dsi.unimi.it/
ne is a free text editor that runs on (hopefully almost) any UN*X
machine. ne is easy to use for the beginner, but powerful and fully
configurable for the wizard, and most sparing in its resource usage.



--
If you try, you can envision peas on earth.
From: Craig on 19 Jul 2010 09:47
On 07/19/2010 06:00 AM, Whirled.Peas wrote:
> The Linux Ware Weekly #22
....
> This week's LWW will be the final weekly edition. If time and real life
> allows, I may post a few more on a more sporadic schedule. I hope this
> series has, in some small way, been helpful.

Thank you /so/ much, WP. For me, where this series has helped is by
reminding or notifying me of alternatives to my current "toolkit."

>
> The discussion of the various strengths and weaknesses of vi and
> emacs borders on religious fervor.

True. It's funny (and a little bit sad) how much emac'ers doth protest! ;-)

....
>
> CLI Text Editors
>
> vi(m)
> Homepage (for vim): http://www.vim.org/
....
>
> Emacs
> Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
....

What I very much appreciate about vi(m) and emacs (to a lesser degree
<cough>) are that they're:
- practically ubiquitous across OSes and
- keyboard-bound - for touch-typists, a god-send.
What a person gives up in gui hand-holding s/he gets back in speed &
flexibility. I strongly recommend a cheatsheet for any of the
cli-oriented editors. It'll speed up the mastery of a core command set
and make it easy to take advantage of more advanced ones.

<cheat-sheets.org> has a good collection for vi(m), emacs & a lot more.

Thank you again, WP.

--
-Craig
From: Frank Hahn on 19 Jul 2010 18:14
"Whirled.Peas" <peas(a)earth.org> wrote in
news:i21i9p$266$1(a)news.datemas.de:

> The Linux Ware Weekly #22
>
>
I like JED from John Davis. He also wrote slrn (newsreader) and S-Lang
library and other stuff. The JED home page is here:

http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

Here is an excerpt from the above page:

"JED is a freely available text editor for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, BeOS,
QNX, and win9X/NT platforms. Although it is a powerful editor designed for
use by programmers, its drop-down menu facility make it one of the
friendliest text editors around. Hence it is ideal for composing simple
email messages as well as editing complex programs in a variety of computer
languages."

I use it with mutt in a command console.

I also use vi. Not that I like it but I know enought commands to at least
make a few changes and then get it saved. ;-)

--
Frank Hahn
From: Whirled.Peas on 19 Jul 2010 20:33
On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:14:55 -0500, Frank Hahn wrote:


> I also use vi. Not that I like it but I know enought commands to at
> least make a few changes and then get it saved. ;-)


I wonder how many people have shut down or reset their computers because
they did not know how to exit vi?


I'd wager the number is probably in the thousands :-)


--
If you try, you can envision peas on earth.
From: Nemesis on 19 Jul 2010 20:53
On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:33:35 +0000, Whirled.Peas wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:14:55 -0500, Frank Hahn wrote:
>
>
>> I also use vi. Not that I like it but I know enought commands to at
>> least make a few changes and then get it saved. ;-)
>
>
> I wonder how many people have shut down or reset their computers because
> they did not know how to exit vi?
There is an alternative ?
>
>
> I'd wager the number is probably in the thousands :-)
vimtutor
[]'s

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