Kate

Me no love nano, me brain only can use nano.

E macs scary. vim no let me leave :(

vim, because that's how my father taught me, and how his father's father taught him.

Choose vim! The generational trauma of file editors!

As a new Linux user who spends as little time editing config files as I can manage, I'm fine with nano.

It's worse than the picture depicts. It's not just the lovers, the elitists and the evangelists, it's the sheer range of choice too, beyond the loudest.

Why would you need a text editor when you can just do cat > file ?

smh

ed is the standard editor

Let the editor holy wars (re)start!

Vim is the one true editor, and the heretics who claim otherwise shall be driven forth and sent to re-education linux boot camps to learn the true ways.

I use Micro in the terminal - it offers good desktop integration with keys similar to DEs like ctrl+v and ctrl+c, rather than being terminal centred (e.g. Ctrl+C is usually the standard interrupt/abort key in the terminal). So it's nice if you're mainly in a desktop but pop in to a terminal occasionally and have the DE muscle memory.

I use Kate outside the terminal.

But honestly, which text editor you use depends on what you use it for and how often. Vim is very powerful and allows very fast use & productivity if you learn it properly and probably very useful if you spend a lot of time in the terminal or TTY, but Nano is more straight forward and easy for a lot of basic terminal based work.

My requirements for a text editor:

• it displays 'A' when I press the 'A' key
• doesn't require more than 1 minute of learning to use it

Bonus points if it comes pre installed.

First choice: use a normal damn GUI text editor

Second choice: Nano. It's simple and comprehensible, and a best CLI choice for newbies. You can then turn to vim, emacs, or whatever, but don't make your life harder from the get-go

People suggesting to start with Vim are probably the same ones pushing for Arch as a first distro. C'mon.

I install micro. I intend to use micro. My fingers type nano anyways. Every time.

vi because it's everywhere, even on servers where packages can't be downloaded or shouldn't be installed.

I'm a emacs guy, but nano should be the only one installed by default. The default editor should tell you how to exit!

Helix is really rad

Nano because I'm too lazy to learn vim or emacs. I want something that works and not something that operates like cheat codes in old video games.

None of them. I need a texteditor, not an unusable wannabe miracle machine for which you need documentation and a diploma just to exit it.

Helix?

ed is the standard text editor.

I don't understand the issue. I've been using Linux less than a year but I started with a KDE desktop so it came with Kate, Kwrite, and Nano. I've literally never needed anything else.

I've tried out a couple IDEs like Codium and Geany, but I don't see what they offer that Kate doesn't.

I've also at least opened Emacs but I didn't get much further than that.

I use Nano in the terminal when I'm editing config files because I read somewhere that it's safer.

I installed Neovim and Micro but I haven't explored those at all yet. I don't have any problems with Nano.

I tried Pluma but I really only use it for dumping lists.

For the most part I use Kate, but for simpler notes I use Kwrite just to keep them in separate spots on my launcher.

I don't see why this is such an issue though.

Even worse: I like GUI editors like Kate/KDevelop/Geany/VSCode. Unless it is on a server obviously.

Nothing wrong with Kate. I know how to use Nano because it's an essential skill for when your machine boots into emergency mode, but aside from that editing text from the terminal is lunacy.

pico!

But nano will do ;)

All I'm gonna say is than nano is installed on almost every Linux os and has the keyboard shortcuts written on the UI.

i am quite fond of kate

I'm too old to keep lying that I don't like nano..

Micro >

Do you have a minute talk about our lord and saviour Vim?

Well now, sed of course!

Nano/micro are great for people who need a terminal text editor but don't want to learn anything to use it.

If you do want to put some time into learning, it really doesn't take long to get to a point of base competency in emacs or vim -- less than an hour for sure to just be able to move around in the document and have a basic understanding of the editing controls.

Both are hugely deep systems that you can keep learning for years, but only at the pace that you need; most tasks can be accomplished pretty easily with a bunch of inputs, but there's usually a much faster way if you know the shortcuts.

As for the difference, vim is more modal -- you switch to editing mode, do some editing, then switch to typing mode and type. Most commands are one to three sequential button presses. For some more exotic functionality you use the command line to type a command, which has auto-complete.

On the other hand emacs is chorded, meaning you use multiple simultaneous keys to do functions, usually a modifier key like ctrl + something else. This gives you more direct power while actually typing, but IMO has a bit steeper of a learning curve, and I just personally don't love the chorded inputs, I think they're more work to input than the sequences in vim. But either editor will give you unprecedented power over text with minimal fuss.

I personally use Helix, which is basically just a slightly different take on Vim, as well as taking inspiration from Kakoune which is another competitor. It's got really nice modern defaults and I like the way that Kakoune treats selections in contrast to Vim.

I use Vim, which has some really handy tricks that I use somewhat often (eg, type :r! followed by a terminal command and it will add the standard output of said command to the bottom of your file).

That being said, there's nothing wrong with Nano. Most distros come with it out of the box nowadays, and its learning curve is practically nonexistent compared to the alternatives.

Emacs with Vim’s modal editing.

Helix

Notepad++ in a Windows XP VM

I see the Helix cucumber got left at the grocery store

The reasons us elders use VI is because on a new installation, it was the only thing available until:

1. You are lucky enough to find a compiled version of PINE/PICO, or

2. You have the compiler installed, and can get the source code and build it yourself.

For some reason, some elitists decided that if you don't know that, then you are a failure. But honestly, when modern distros started coming out with WYSIWYG-type editors, it was a relief, even though I reverted to VI/VIM because of muscle-memory, I do not push it on new users. It's the same argument people make for driving manual vs automatic, sure it's useful, but when was the last time you even saw a manual car? (At least in North America).

You want to live dangerously, go ahead and put NetBSD with just the basics and leave the rest of us who want to do something useful alone.

Best choice: use whatever comes pre-installed.

This is kinda irrelevant for a new user, but vi/vim is available literally everywhere. If you need to shh onto another machine and edit some files, it's the only editor you can reliably expect to exist.

Commit heresy with evil-mode Emacs.

Kate master race of KDE

Do you need operating system? Select emacs

Do you want to be elite coder? Select (neo)vim

Do you need to just edit .conf files? Select nano

Nano is objectively the most beginner friendly of the bunch.

Poor souls of those that haven't found the way of the Gnu.

May the Gnu have mercy of your lost ways and show you the light M-x show-light RET

May the macros never lack in your life,
May your parentheses be balanced,
And may your init.el pass with no fails.

Emen

You guys edit text?

Kate and micro

mcedit😎

Man, I have wanted to learn Emacs for a while, but those shortcut keys kill my hands and soul in general. I know about Evil mode, but for whatever reason I just gotta use default controls when I play a new game. The graphics are terrible, but they say that the gameplay for emacs is pretty great. I guess you could say that Emacs is the Dark Souls of text editors.

dd or GTFO.

Nano, because it was the first I'd ever used and it does everything I need it to do (i.e. very little, edits the occasional config file and that's it)

nano lovers? Is there such thing? Nano was the one I used until I learned how to do basics on vim, nano is just the more intuitive/easiest way to just edit a file and it's enough most of the time

Honestly, since I switched to vim and got through the first month of "why the fuck am I doing this to myself", I just can't go back. Especially once you get to customizing it, installing plugins, themes etc ... it's better than any IDE out there.

I'm using Emacs, but after getting a bit used to the vanilla keybindings for the past couple of weeks i still feel like vim-like motions are better, so now i'm playing around with a helix-mode package to emulate helix keybindings (i was using helix before switching to emacs). One change i did make though is bind end-of-line and beginning-of-line to $ and 0 like in proper vim. Helix uses END ans HOME keys for this and i hate it lol, no idea why they thought it was a good idea to move that far away from the home row for that.

Micro or even better is Fresh. Make use of the modern terminal features for mouse interaction, text highlighting, and standard shortcuts.

I want whatever is closest to Notepad++. Honestly, KDE already comes with that built in.

I miss atom, when it was discontinued I tried vscodium and immediately hated it, then used kate for a while, and now use neovim. neovim is nice but atom was just so good

Can I introduce you to the miracles of fresh? https://getfresh.dev/

Choose helix. Native LSP support comes with it, and you will lose vim friends.

gram

Vim or Zed

Gedit for docs (plain and simple + have basic spelling/code highlighting), kate for weird things like JSON (have actual tools to fix spacing/tabulation)

Vim or neovim. At first just because I wanted to learn it for fun. But now because it after I memorized a few core commands, it really did just feel great to use. Quick and surprisingly easy.

I constantly switch between Nixvim, DOOM Emacs, helix, and NVChad. I can never settle on one editor for long. I don't know why.

I use

1. sublime-text when not confined to a terminal
2. nano for example with git's CLI
3. vi/vim when the others are not available.

Also the naming of these apps are incredible confusing. Im using linux full time for over a year now (Mint, Bazzite) and still cant remember the names of half the damn utility apps. Its a good thing most distros show you the most likely thing if you start typing in some slightly relevant text to the search.

My idiot brain hardwired by years of windows use: -I need to download an app... Something, something app store

Linux: -You mean Bazaar?

-Aw yisss, but also want to make a screenshot, something to do with snipping tool?

-Spectacle maybe?

-Fuck yeah!

Just go with ed, it is the standard for a reason.

Ok hear me out: Microsoft Edit

Nano in the CLI, kate in the GUI

Who loves nano??

I really don't care what you use but I highly recommend picking something extensible or fully featured. No need to cut yourself off of valuable tools.

(Also I use Neovim BTW)

vim

Why is this post not mentioning the most important editor of all time? Why is this post deliberately missing out the standard text editor ed, that wastes no system resource on unnecessary output like help messages or a text buffer. If you are coming to Linux you should really start looking into learning ed, since, well it is the standard Texteditor overall.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

neovim

My colon quit.

Noobs get hit with friendly fire.

kate when I am using GUI and vim when I am using CLI.

nano and kate I edit text not books of configs.

Nano for TUI and Pulsar for GUI.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Started using helix after vim and neovim went full llm brain.

vis

tag yourself i'm the french vanilla sublime text softly reassuring to safety

gnome text editor

You never hear about Nice Editor but I'd like to submit it for consideration. It's no IDE, but I like it better than nano.

Micro is pretty good

nano lovers 😂

I think it comes with a text editor already built in. I don't need a text editor though.

Nvim

Leafpad, in the terminal nano and vscodium for code. If I really have to open code in the terminal: vim

I use both vim and nano.

I use nano for simple text edits, anything more and I use sublime, or code.

Used to develop c++ in emacs though, never got the benefit of VIM, super hard to use.

Linux has made great strides to being approachable for new users. The agony of choice for so many things (distro, editor, nearly any tool family with more than one option) and the factionalism around the options is probably one of the few big obstacles left.

I don't have a solution for the factionalism. I'd put forth a suggestion for a simple "standard" choice (Kate/gedit for GUI and nano for CLI; I personally use vim, but I think nano is more approachable) but I'm sure someone will disagree and we're back to square one.

I liked Sublime enough to pay for it. It has become my primary text editor at home.

I also like Atom/Pulsar, but it takes a but too long to open for my use case.

Obsidian isn't exactly a text editor, but it fits many of the use cases. It may be closed source, but all the files are accessible and usable if the app ever disappears.

I want to use vim more, but I'm lazy, and the learning curve keeps putting me off. I might get there eventually.

Nano is ol' reliable. When everything else failed, Nano was still there for me and worked perfectly.

hx

Gentoo picked vi for me about 20 years ago...

Micro because it's literally nano with more familiar shortcuts

sudo sed -i

I used to use nano.

Since I learned how to exit vim, without murdering it, I use vim. Vim is mostly my choice becasue deleting and moving lines is incedibly fast and it has the very best code highlighting.

Which text editor do you use?

• Emacs mostly
• sometimes fin for configs and some other small file tweaks and when developing/testing fin,
• sometimes mcedit just because it's an awesome under sung hero of easy tui text editors. ... beats nano imo.
• sometimes leafpad, like when i need some intermediary between things that are being stubborn to paste between
• rare neovim, like when i'm trying to learn neovim, or trying something that only neovim has
• rare nano... there are probably still times...
• once kate to see what it was like, I liked it, then I added the features I liked to emacs.

Came here to see my helix fam, was not disappointed.

neovim for terminal based editing and jetbrains for a more full fledged project experience.

serious question:
what are you using your text editor for that requires all these features?

i just hot down quick notes, maybe an address, quick and bare budget, or a short list of things.

the kind of things i thought people use text editors for.

more robust documents, libre office or word.

I'm not making a joke, I'm really wondering why it matters? isn't it just notepad or what am i missing?

Commandline? Nano (or Pico or whatever) if it exists. Else vim/vi. I originally used emacs back in the day. However, for anything else, I'm using the closest thing to notepad++ I can find at the time.

yeah, it's all true, lol.

it's emacs, though.

Who uses nano?

I wish I could look at it from a neutral position, but emacs is just too perfect to recommend anything else.

When I uninstalled Windows and switched to Linux (CachyOS (which is Arch BTW)) I also took the time to free myself from VScode to completely escape Microsoft's fuckery.

I learned how to use Neovim. I've got a configuration that I really like and I took care to make it portable enough that I can just copy over the init.lua file to set everything up on a different computer.

However this is only earned through weeks of Lua hell. You are effectively building your own editor from almost the ground up. I only recommend Neovim if you want the first medium scale project you work on to be Neovim itself.

I just use the inbuilt text editor in linux mint.

Or a full fledged IDE when I edit code.

I use nvim/ vim just because i was new and didn't know anything I could edit on an ssh connection with beside vim. And it isn't that hard, using lazyvim atm (still new and dont have time to configure myself) and if I can just use the mouse if I am too stupid, not that hard. But it get more and more convenient as time goes on. You encounter enough times and just think to yourself "is there a better way?" and most of the time there is! Just start with "i", "" and ":wq".

xed

Suck it dorks!

Nano, Micro, JOE, ee(1). Those are my suggestions.

Comparing an Operating System with text editors doesn't make any sense.

VS Code gang

But real *nix'ers use ed

You may as well start there. You'll be using it eventually once you inevitably develop the same passionate idolization of Unix that I, the righteous self appointed evangelist of all things good && just && Unix possess.

/s

My distro came with Nano, so here I am

I use Vim. I am not a power user by any stretch but it's what I use. I know like three shortcuts, which is enough to make me marginally faster in vim than nano. I don't really feel much desire to learn a terminal editor and be super good with it. There are other things I'm more interested in spending my time on if I feel motivated to learn.

The first step of any linux install is installing vim/neovim. Anything else is sheer apostasy

I use vim, but not because it’s good. I’m just not up for learning something else right now

i miss notepad plus plus, that's pretty much the only thing i wish i still had from before linux though.

i use whatever is default for my distro installation. then feel "off" because it's not notepad.

Micro. What you are looking for is micro. It's great

I use an IDE when I want to code, and Kwrite for when I just need a simple-ass .txt file

I was a big fan of Atom before it died, and I recently found out that it now has a spiritual successor, https://pulsar-edit.dev/ which I've been using for when I do coding projects

And then there's me on Geany...

joe. And I don't even really know why.

I love gram

Kate and Geany are where its at tbh.

@calango@programming.dev Geany and Notepad Next.

I still use pico.

@calango@programming.dev ed(1).

JOVE all the way!

Micro.

I hate modal keybindings (Vim, Nano and Emacs, all alike; though the Object-Verb paradigm looks promising for me, but until now, nothing's better than quasimodal CUA/spring-loaded CUA).

Use whatever you want. I use nano, why? Because all I need it for is to do some simple config edits in the terminal emulator and it does all I need while keeping it simple.

Having gone thrugh the litany or editors over the years. I have stripped down my needs to nano. I just need a quick edit here and there on occiasions.

Nano is too barebones. I just want the tui equivalent of Gedit or Kwrite or something.

Use whatever you want. I use nano, why? Because all I need it for is to do some simple config edits in the terminal emulator and it does all I need while keeping it simple.

I am no coder, so I only ever need to modify configs or write down my thoughts. nano for configs, Standard Notes for thoughts

Gram with a modifed helix

I'm using vscode.

Only Fresh

The reason why I'm on team Vim is because it's standard. A copy of it is installed on pretty much every Unix-like system out there. Vi is built into Busybox.

"New? Nano. Wanna try another because you're comfortable now? Do it." Problem solved.

I use Neovim with this config https://github.com/Willie169/nvim-config