What is your favorite text editor?

Assuming my fonts aren't misleading me, you're showing single quote ' (shares key with " on a US keyboard) and backtick ` (shares key with ~ on most US keyboards). They are different things. The ` is used, in both C and Bourne shells to run a command.
 
I've done a review of some editors. Good ones:
small: featherpad,geany,leafpad,mousepad,nedit
medium: kate,kwrite,liteide,madedit,xed
large: codeblocks,spyder3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
/usr/local/bin/kwrite was installed by package kate-21.04.3
Code:
/usr/local/bin/spyder3 was installed by package py38-spyder-3.2.7_13
 
Alain De Vos thanks,

Code:
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # pkg install featherpad geany leafpad mousepad nedit kate kwrite liteide madedit xed codeblocks spyder3
…
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'kwrite' have been found in the repositories
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'spyder3' have been found in the repositories
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # pkg provides kwrite | grep bin/
…
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # pkg info --list editors/kate | grep bin/kwrite$
        /usr/local/bin/kwrite
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # pkg provides spyder3
𡀦…
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # pkg install featherpad geany leafpad mousepad nedit kate liteide madedit xed codeblocks devel/py-spyder
…

– and I found KWrite already present, installed by editors/kate (no separate port)

1633225993348.png
MadEdit does not respond to its shortcut for Exit.



From your Writing text topic:

I'd like to use Kate, but it lacks support for the character composition keystrokes to which I became accustomed after switching from Mac OS X to FreeBSD-based systems.

The same problem with Code::Blocks, KWrite, LiteIDE, MadEdit, NEdit and Spyder.

xed is free from the problem, so I kept the application then took a closer look at features: <https://github.com/linuxmint/xed#readme>
 
Any experience with jed?

From pkg info jed:

JED is a highly customizable text editor offering most of the
commonly used features of EMACS without the proportions of EMACS. The default
configuration uses EMACS keystrokes, though WordStar keystrokes are
available, and most any keystrokes can be programmed.n JED is customizable
and programmable in the language SLANG, which can look like forth or c,
depending on your preferences.

And any experience with s-lang?

 
My main editor is Kate.
I like very much that it has block marking mode (toggle between line and block marking modes with ctrl-shift-B).
This is not only useful for copy/pasting, but also for editing.
Try marking a block over a few lines and start typing... just cool :)
Other things I like with Kate is that it has sweet window splitting and does not annoy/distract me with "fancy" optics.

When in console, I use vi. But I don't like switching often between vi and Kate, because my muscle memory also has degenerated, like SirDice explained...
one upan a time that was my text editor too . overally a nice editor 👍 But when I realized they put telemetry in it and kde I diched both And got in a looong journey that made me end up on freebsd (yeah) now my favorite editor is micro and I like terminal editors way more (expect vi :D)
 
You might remember Clippy from M$ Office, and its parody Vigor.
uf001415.gif


My brain often is quite mushy, and somebody inspired by Vigor wrote a real blend between Vim and clippy. It's being called Kakoune, which is more useful to me than it sounds and way less annoying than clippy, so Kakoune it is, a very much Vim-like editor with many contextual help always on display:

screenshot-tmux.gif


editors/kakoune is even part of the FreeBSD ports collection, so installation is a breeze.
 
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The one I use most is the editor built into midnight commander, mcedit. I keep thinking I should learn emacs, but it seems very complicated, and what I do most with an editor is copy and paste a few lines in various configuration files. The frustrating thing about mcedit is that I can't find a way of copying lines onto the clipboard. Pasting works normally.
Under X11 you can select text with <left mouse button + shift key> and paste with <middle mouse button + shift key>
 
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