linuxmemes

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

Micro >

Notepad++ in a Windows XP VM

I see the Helix cucumber got left at the grocery store

Well now, sed of course!

Emacs with Vim’s modal editing.

Helix

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.

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.

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

Commit heresy with evil-mode Emacs.

Kate master race of KDE

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.

Nano is objectively the most beginner friendly of the bunch.

You guys edit text?

Kate and micro

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

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

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.

mcedit😎

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)

dd or GTFO.

gram

Vim or Zed

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.

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