Which text editor do you use?

    • uniquethrowagay@feddit.org
      91·
      12 days ago

      Kate is by far the best GUI text editor I ever used. And unless it’s a short config file and I use nano, I want GUI. It’s not the 80s anymore!

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
      4·
      12 days ago

      It has a few quirks I utterly despise :(

      Like it cannot print invisible characters. Had a script create some broken folders with a BOM character at the beginning. I couldn’t access the files in any way except that they appeared in dolphin and ls. Had to delete them via the fucking inode.

      I was forced to use VSCode (an open source fork at least) to find out what the fuck was wrong with the input file the script used to generate the folder name.

      • EnsignWashout
        7·
        12 days ago

        Like it cannot print invisible characters.

        I was looking at an option to display invisible characters in Kate like last week. So it got better, I guess.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
          6·
          11 days ago

          Only non-printable spaces from what I can tell.

          The BOM character does not fall into this category and is still invisible. Try pasting it into Kate. It’s between those arrows:

          ---><---
  • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
    782·
    12 days ago

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

    E macs scary. vim no let me leave :(

  • plateee@piefed.socialEnglish
    63·
    12 days ago

    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!

    • EnsignWashout
      5·
      12 days ago

      haha!

      Sometimes I feel like my side of the holy war isn’t engaging in completely good faith.

      I might switch sides to emacs if my fingers were long enough to reach the key combinations.

      Maybe I’ll go try it, anyway!

      …

      What was the command to exit vi, again…?

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
      8·
      12 days ago

      I was too untilI switched to opensuse aeon and default is vim instead of nano. I just switched. I don’t care. Both are not perfect - i won’ create yet another fork just because i want to do it differently. I don’t get why vim has so few shortcuts.

        • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          7·
          12 days ago

          Someone’s gotta do it. I’m leaving this comment so it’s not me.

      • daggermoon@piefed.worldEnglish
        41·
        12 days ago

        I was playing around with Free BSD I think and the default was Vi. I was just like “yeah, no” and gave up. I didn’t have wi-fi working so I couldn’t install anything else.

  • Digit@lemmy.todayEnglish
    30·
    11 days ago

    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.

    same cat surrounded by dozens of text editor courgettes that look like snakes

    • barzaria@lemmy.world
      112·
      12 days ago

      This command will literally overwrite the file that you do whenever you try to edit it. You need two >> to append at the end of a file, but it’s super-duper hard to put text in the middle of a file from the terminal. That is why people use editors, for sure. Now that I think about it, there probably is some psychopath who uses the actual command line as an editor. They’re probably more elitist than Vim users lol.

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
    21·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
      141·
      12 days ago

      Idk it took me 3 attempts to learn (neo)vim, but now every Linux system I SSH in I just go straight for vi(m), because moving around and editing in Nano is just so slow when you’re used to vim keys.

      I swear I’m not trying to proselytize. People should use whatever they want, and these discussions are pointless. It’s all just tradeoffs and getting used to things.

  • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
    20·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • oysvendsen@lemmy.world
    20·
    12 days ago

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

    • EnsignWashout
      9·
      12 days ago

      Not our fault everyone blows past the kind offer of : vimtutor on startup! (I kid. The default editor shouldn’t require a class.)

      You’re 100% correct. Nano is a perfectly reasonable default.

      That said, it is 2026. It also wouldn’t kill us to default to an interactive one-time prompt that defaults to nano, but offers one or two others, and removes itself after setting the user’s choice.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.worldEnglish
    18·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      5·
      12 days ago

      I’ve been using micro as well recently. But other than that if I’m on a remote server I’ll use whatever it has available, starting with nano then vi/vim.

    • j3tt@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      The so-called desktop integration is what I disable in vim. I want to have the terminal in control and use select text to copy instead of entering visual mode. When I want visual mode, I use my keyboard. (:

    • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
      9·
      12 days ago

      This is my reply every time someone suggests nvim. Is it on the servers I use but I’m not an admin for? No? Then it doesn’t sound like a great option.