What is your favorite text editor?

Doom Emacs with vi like key bindings is the almost perfect text editor for me.
For rapid editing of config files I often use vim
 
The first text editor I used was edlin in DOS back in the mid 1980s. Who does not know it: it's some sort of poor man's ed. So ed was kind of familiar to me when I first encountered it. Around 1994 -- still in DOS -- I discovered vim in one of its earliest DOS ports and it became my favourite text editing program. And it remained there since then, about 28 years later. In all kinds of operating systems I came across (DOS, Windows from Win95 to 10, different Linux distros, NetBSD, MacOS, FreeBSD).

In the meanwhile I used also a lot of other editors; e.g. in the late 1990s Emacs (Gnu Emacs as well as Xemacs) became for some time my daily driver, even for reading mail and usenet news (with gnus). But I returned every time to vim.

So, I can say: vim is the favourite, others serve specific tasks.
 
I started out by learning vi and I refuse to use anything else. Don't know a thing about emacs or any of those other editors, don't care.

In Windows though it's notepad++
 
1647340601223.png
 
Vim
I also started to appreciate the advantages of pure vi.

It's hard to get into it. You'll need to force yourself to do it. But it's worth it.
If you really do much editing, particulary coding, take my advice and at least try it.
It's not everbody's style, but you cannot figure that out until you've tried.
The hardest thing about learning vi/Vim actually is not to compare it with other editors. So, throw anything overboard you've learned about any editor you've used before ever. And at least at the beginning don't use gVim, use plain Vim in the shell - don't use the mouse at all. You may be allowed to use arrow and delete keys at the beginning, but mouse is strictly forbidden 🤓 Otherwise you will gain no satisfactionary learning effort, cursing only, because you'll try to use vi as other editors, missing the benefits of vi/Vim completely, because the core point of the great efficiency of vi/Vim lies simply within NOT to use the mouse.
Some may really be astonished how d#m*n%&df#k$n speedy you can become... 😲

[....................................................................................................................................................]


While thumbing through here I saw also something about notebooks. I am not talking laptops or MS notepad,
I am actually talking pen & paper ✍️ here.

A couple of years ago I "downgraded" myself, getting back doing two things more:
Writing much more on real paper and banning ballpoint pens for writing and using fountain pens instead - again, like in school 40 years ago 👨‍🦳 .
As I already mentioned elsewhere here, exercise books and notebooks don't cost much. You get a good fountain pen also as school's learning material for 10...30 bucks (Tip: Keep your eyes open for sales in super markets a few weeks before the new school's term starts.)

There are several points why I can recommend:
Your writing becomes better.

With a fountain pen your handwriting is much better as with a ballpoint pen (well at least for my chicken scratch 😆)

It's always good to write things down.
You have saved what you want look up and get it quickly.
You learn better that way.
E.g. I find it's better to write some shell commands down, even if I will never look them up again, because I've learned them that way, than to consult the man page many times. 🤔

Short notes are taken quicker by handwriting than typing - well maybe in most, or at least my case.

But most, when I am in customers meetings I stopped using the laptop for taking the minutes many years ago. (I have it with me, because in some cases it's used. But most of the times it stays closed, and I use an exercise book and a fountain pen to take notes (also looks more professional than notebook and ballpoint :cool:)
It may appears more modern when typing into a laptop, but:
- your are quicker to write
- you easily and quickly can do some sketches if needed
- your customers feels more appreciated, because you adress him more instead of looking at a monitor behind a wall and he does not see what you are really doing - if you really listen to him 100%
Afterwards you may send him by mail a clean PDF, Xmind, powerpoint.... whatever... also emphazises you care, what was communicated.
 

Attachments

  • pen_n_paper.png
    pen_n_paper.png
    1.5 MB · Views: 102
Vim
I also started to appreciate the advantages of pure vi.

It's hard to get into it. You'll need to force yourself to do it. But it's worth it.
If you really do much editing, particulary coding, take my advice and at least try it.
It's not everbody's style, but you cannot figure that out until you've tried.
The hardest thing about learning vi/Vim actually is not to compare it with other editors. So, throw anything overboard you've learned about any editor you've used before ever. And at least at the beginning don't use gVim, use plain Vim in the shell - don't use the mouse at all. You may be allowed to use arrow and delete keys at the beginning, but mouse is strictly forbidden 🤓 Otherwise you will gain no satisfactionary learning effort, cursing only, because you'll try to use vi as other editors, missing the benefits of vi/Vim completely, because the core point of the great efficiency of vi/Vim lies simply within NOT to use the mouse.
Some may really be astonished how d#m*n%&df#k$n speedy you can become... 😲

[....................................................................................................................................................]


While thumbing through here I saw also something about notebooks. I am not talking laptops or MS notepad,
I am actually talking pen & paper ✍️ here.

A couple of years ago I "downgraded" myself, getting back doing two things more:
Writing much more on real paper and banning ballpoint pens for writing and using fountain pens instead - again, like in school 40 years ago 👨‍🦳 .
As I already mentioned elsewhere here, exercise books and notebooks don't cost much. You get a good fountain pen also as school's learning material for 10...30 bucks (Tip: Keep your eyes open for sales in super markets a few weeks before the new school's term starts.)

There are several points why I can recommend:
Your writing becomes better.

With a fountain pen your handwriting is much better as with a ballpoint pen (well at least for my chicken scratch 😆)

It's always good to write things down.
You have saved what you want look up and get it quickly.
You learn better that way.
E.g. I find it's better to write some shell commands down, even if I will never look them up again, because I've learned them that way, than to consult the man page many times. 🤔

Short notes are taken quicker by handwriting than typing - well maybe in most, or at least my case.

But most, when I am in customers meetings I stopped using the laptop for taking the minutes many years ago. (I have it with me, because in some cases it's used. But most of the times it stays closed, and I use an exercise book and a fountain pen to take notes (also looks more professional than notebook and ballpoint :cool:)
It may appears more modern when typing into a laptop, but:
- your are quicker to write
- you easily and quickly can do some sketches if needed
- your customers feels more appreciated, because you adress him more instead of looking at a monitor behind a wall and he does not see what you are really doing - if you really listen to him 100%
Afterwards you may send him by mail a clean PDF, Xmind, powerpoint.... whatever... also emphazises you care, what was communicated.
The price for that is a cluttered desk full of scribbled-on paper that you don't need any more. You can format a hard drive. Try erasing your own scribbles - it's bad enough doing that with a lead pencil on decent quality paper - erasers generate dust that needs to be vacuumed up or picked up with a wet rag. What if you used a fountain pen? Erasing what you just wrote (just to reclaim the paper) is a pain, you either end up with a torn-up piece of paper that looks ugly on your desk, or (in case of erasable-ink pens, if anyone here remembers them) it would be no better than a pencil.
 
I like paper too. I prefer mechanical pencils to fountain pens. Should we open another thread about our favourite handwriting setup?

You can format a hard drive. Try erasing your own scribbles
You can take a pile of paper and put it in the trash for recycling. Please don't do it with your hard drive.
 
Well, I don't erase what I've written by hand. That would be dirty, you're right in this point.
I cross out and rewrite, use new paper or Tipp-ex.
As I also do not save everything on my computer forever in one single home or documents directory and search the heap everytime I need something, I do not save every little piece of paper forever. I throw away what I don't use anymore. But on my computer I don't use a "wastebasket". I even have none. I distinguish files to keep (-> NAS) from not to keep (-> rm).
It's all just about organisation.

...but I also would not quote a complete former post either, because this would trash up the place.
 
You can take a pile of paper and put it in the trash for recycling. Please don't do it with your hard drive.
yeah, when I had an HDD that I wanted to completely destroy - that was way back in 2005, I believe. A 160GB Western Digital out of a "WinXP Home" Dell PC that never saw an Internet connection. The drive had some weird and outdated connections already (which is why that PC was so cheap back then), so it would have been no use to me later on anyway. For whatever reason I had back then, I just wanted to completely destroy it. So, I unscrewed the case, took out the platters, and broke them with a hammer until I was too tired to swing the hammer. After that, I put the stuff into a dumpster. Good luck trying to verify if anything at all existed on those platter fragments, let alone recover anything. Yeah, platters are made with poisonous semi-precious metals, but that's another story. And, most places do have some kind of electronics recycling services if you look around, and don't care too much that your porn stash leaks out. 😏
 
At least nano would not look like this (input of German and French into ee):
ee.png


The funny thing is when I open again the file after saving and leaving, the display of the accents is correct:
ee2.png
 
… (input …

What method?

I have the same issue with ee (not with nano) with the Control-Shift-U approach (should I say Unicode?)

… open again the file after saving and leaving, the display of the accents is correct:

If you curse to the end of the line then use the space bar, does ee present characters that were not input?

Like so (with just one character in the file):

1647456242386.png
 
What method?

I have the same issue with ee (not with nano) with the Control-Shift-U approach (should I say Unicode?)



If you curse to the end of the line then use the space bar, does ee present characters that were not input?

Like so (with just one character in the file):

View attachment 13370
Actually I am using a keyboard with German qwertz layout, containing special keys (ö, ä, ü, ß) as well as dead keys for the accent characters (grave, acute, circonflexe). X11 is configured with XkbLayout "de". So I do not need some sort of input method here.
Terminal emulators used: xterm (the standard xorg one), xfce4-terminal. When I am logging in remotely from my imac with the Mac terminal app it looks the same (using an X86_64 Mac).

I can reproduce the behaviour with additional characters appearing after the input. This happens after I saved the file, closed ee and reopened again. Directly on the machine as well as by remote access.
ee3.jpg

Wild guess: there is an issue with the curses library or rather how ee makes use of it, maybe? (n)vi or vim do not have this problem.
 
I never noticed that until now because I rarely use it but you're right: ee can display existing UTF-8 characters fine but completely fails at displaying newly typed ones.
Are you aware of any related bug report or should we open one?

7 years ago:

13 years ago, maybe much older:
I am releasing ee because I hate to see new users and non-computer types get frustrated by vi, and would like to see more intuitive interfaces for basic tools (both character-based and graphical) become more pervasive. Terminal capabilities and communication speeds have evolved considerably since the time in which vi's interface was created, allowing much more intuitive interfaces to be used. Since character-based I/O won't be completely replaced by graphical user interfaces for at least a few more years, I'd like to do what I can to make using computers with less glamorous interfaces as easy to use as possible. If terminal interfaces are still used in ten years, I hope neophytes won't still be stuck with only vi.

Hugh Mahon
(https://github.com/herrbischoff/ee)
 
Back
Top