What is your favorite text editor?

My first exposure to Unix was in the early nineties with Sco Unix. Of course it was vi for text editing. As the first editor I learned for Unix it's been hard to abandon for me. I call it vi hell when I fat finger commands. It's been to hard to break away from it, so it's what I still use. Of course there's variants, right now I'm using vim. At some point I'd like to get used to something possibly better, but I always fall back to vi.
To be honest I learned vi back in 2001ish when I made the jump from Windows to Linux, and have yet to find anything better.
 
What a topic.

In my opinion the best user friendly editor has been Xedit. We have editors/the but I think it is not the same. I have been get used to vi since ancient Linux Suse 0.99-something , quite some time before the switch from aout to elf. The worse experience I have ever had related to editors has been a Linux rescue medium without vi but nano or whatever. :wq
 
One that is really interesting to me is Acme. It is the main text editor for Plan 9 (Made by the same guys as UNIX and originally meant to be the successor). I really wanted to like it but it requires a mouse which I personally find really claustrophobic. If any of you here prefer an editor supporting a mouse, definitely give it a go :).

Another Plan 9 one is also Sam. Again mouse driven but slightly less complex.
If on Windows, you can either use Inferno or ACME-SAC. On FreeBSD, you can use either Acme from Plan9port or Wily (an X11 clone).
 
I use nano a lot. I never really have a need to need anything more advanced for editing files on CLI. Perhaps I'm just missing something here :p I'm bad and love Atom. I wish I could get Atom on FreeBSD. I think I could switch my desktop to FreeBSD at that rate
 
I'm going to add that my favorite DOS editor was qedit. It was the only editor I knew back then that could cut and paste columns. I wonder if it ever got ported to other OS's...
 
Oh yeah, vi or die (it even rhymes somewhat so I got to be right) :D

:D

More seriously.. It is true that /usr/bin/vi is my main editor for most tasks. But I guess I am a little crazy like that because my ksh shell is even set up to utilize vi mode as well.

The reason is simple: I am lazy. These days all my servers are FreeBSD but back in the day I was working with Solaris, Linux, AIX and Windows. So we quickly made vi usage mandatory in order to have some consistency. I don't want to think about editors when I need to edit /etc/resolv.conf nor do I want others to waste time over that. So.. vi.

Even today I mostly use vi, I also have vim installed as well but it only gets used when I need to edit 2 files at the same time.

I understand, the good thing about vi is that it usually comes pre-installed on any unix-like system, and it's quite simple.

There is a sublime3 port, but it does not start for some reason, so I tried installing the port you mentioned. That works indeed.
^R is sweet. Should suggest the Kate devs to add such.
However, sublime seems not to have split screen, a feature I cannot live without.

Regarding Kate, this is how it looks just now. When I tried it out first, I didn't think I would like it that much.
View attachment 4357
What I like with Kate too, is that it is the only editor (except of ancient Brief editor) I know of which is able to block mark, cut/copy and paste.
See the blue marked text block below the open menu. This is so convenient!

Kate is very cool as a graphic text editor. It has many features and coloring of syntax.
 
I use ne.

I always find this subject a little amusing. Coming from DOS I guess I'm a bit spoiled with the number of editors available. It seems in the *nix world, there are not so many, and they seem to be clones of one another. In any case, I've found editors/ne to be to my liking. The key strokes (eg ctrl-y, del line, and alt-y del to end) are familiar to me. The only thing I miss is the paragraph formatting (eg. Alt-B as used in Qedit). I don't write code, so for me the ability to use the arrow keys for formatting and re-formatting is the most important.
 
IMO editors/vim is the best,
gvim and vim are best text editors,
but if you want more complex and easy
to use IDE, use devel/geany, it is nice too,
also there are many geany plugins in ports tree.

gvim:
ck5j8Cg.png


geany:
fsMlcCQ.png
 
Agree with ILUXA on devel/geany. But, I have to tell you that I use so many (each with specialties)
that I end up with an array of editors like a toolbox full of favorites. Setups for FreeBSD installs; I started using the "ee" editor a long time ago - so that one stands out if I have to pick "most favorite."
 
I would like to know which text editor you use in FreeBSD, I like vim very much to program, for very simple things I usually use nano.

Which one is your favorite?

PD: This does not try to be a flame "emacs vs vim" just a nice debate.

vi or ed
 
I am a big fan of misc/ytree an xtree clone using ncurses.
With the shell there I use ee for editing. Shortcut of E with the file highlighted.
I edit my .chsrc to editor=ee as my first run setup chore.

The comma :q exit symbol of vim always messes me up. ee is just so simple to me. escape key for menu. Horray.
When I first came here I was glad we had nano in packages. But I found myself lost without nano in base. I really found the ee switch quite seemless.
Writing /editing dts files for Arm has proven it is good for 2K+ lines of code. The ee search function works nice and next search function is easy.
Shortcuts onscreen up on top is really the best for me. Maybe in a few years I will migrate down to vim.
Anything in base.
 
I recently added editors/kakoune to the ports tree. It's a nice little editor that improves on vim's modal model. It has been in development for 5 years now and they just had their first release. Kakoune has a focus on selections and interactivity and you'll generally see ahead of time what portion of text the next command will apply to.

https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/Migrating-from-Vim shows some of the differences to vim.
http://kakoune.org/ has some screencasts that show off what's possible.
 
I recently added editors/kakoune to the ports tree. It's a nice little editor that improves on vim's modal model. It has been in development for 5 years now and they just had their first release. Kakoune has a focus on selections and interactivity and you'll generally see ahead of time what portion of text the next command will apply to.

https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/Migrating-from-Vim shows some of the differences to vim.
http://kakoune.org/ has some screencasts that show off what's possible.

Wow thank you for sharing this. I think I'm going to look deeper into this to see if I can make this my main editor. If so, I think this really only puts me 1 application away from being able to switch my desktop to FreeBSD
 
Don't leave us hanging in suspense. What's the one application? Maybe something can be done. ;-)
:D I sure wish! I'd really like DRM support in Firefox for DRM protected video playback, but to my understanding, Mozilla locks that in to their own compiled binaries. However, I COULD just make a VM and run FF in there yes? I'd also say Plasma5 but that REALLY isn't a requirement for me. Otherwise, it seems FreeBSD does everything I need it to
 
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