What is your favorite text editor?

I find vim and emacs archaic.
There's a reason why "Cut & Paste" became ubiquitous and "Kill & Yank" didn't. It's because "Cut & Paste" reflects something people understand from the real world whilst "Kill & Yank" sounds like the angry outbursts of a developer who's had too much coffee. :rude:
 
A good editor needs three commands:
- Open
- Save
- Exit
Save is not needed, it shall be automatic.

Open is not needed, the file name (one!) is on the command line (or what you clicked on the file manager).

Exit is only needed when running from the CLI. And if booting was faster, you could just use the (hardware) reboot button.

P.S. this comment is meant as humor.
 
I find vim and emacs archaic.
There's a reason why "Cut & Paste" became ubiquitous and "Kill & Yank" didn't. It's because "Cut & Paste" reflects something people understand from the real world whilst "Kill & Yank" sounds like the angry outbursts of a developer who's had too much coffee. :rude:
Cut and paste requires moving the hand to the mouse. Keeping the fingers on the keyboard is faster, for experienced typists.
 
Cut is CTRL-C and paste is CTRL-V in most modern GUI text editors like Geany (although I must confess I rely far too much on massaging the rodent for other tasks). I did use emacs for about a year for programming in Haskell but I felt like I was “fighting” emacs not “using” it. I can’t even remember any of the key bindings.
 
I find vim and emacs archaic.
There's a reason why "Cut & Paste" became ubiquitous and "Kill & Yank" didn't. It's because "Cut & Paste" reflects something people understand from the real world whilst "Kill & Yank" sounds like the angry outbursts of a developer who's had too much coffee. :rude:

Also, there are still editors which mislabeled snarfing as “copy”.
 


Error Messages – “?”

If at any time you make an error in the commands you type to ed , it will tell you by typing

?

This is about as cryptic as it can be, …

No disrespect to users of ed and ee (I'm not here to pigeon-hole people), but the cryptic aspects of the software are what drive the wish for newcomers to have the choice of a less cryptic experience.

… You can turn them off but it seems no one does

1632687551791.png


– someone does not recommend it, but it is a done thing.
 
I used ed only for a short time, before changing to emacs, and since then I use mainly emacs, only a little vi. Before that I used a more primitive line editor: sos in DEC System 10. But sos was easier to use, it had a line altering mode, one was able to read a line char by char and delete or insert chars in it. In ed you must either
delete the whole line and write it again, or apply an s command on it.
 
but the cryptic aspects of the software are what drive the wish for newcomers to have the choice of a less cryptic experience.
I think you may have to unwrap exactly what is "cryptic" before a meaningful discussion can be made. At least accessibility issues can be easily defined.
 
If you are suggesting that the FreeBSD tips file is filled with "cryptic" issues. There is absolutely no way you will solve them all. Certainly not by any amount of work put into an installer.

What about the basic shell usage? I.e ctrl-z ("program accidentally vanishes") and ctrl-d ("shell accidentally logs me out").

This will be endless and by the end, you will not likely have a useful OS anymore.
 
It's not about me. It's for the benefit of other users.
You assume all other users only have very narrow needs of an editor?

You may be surprised to find that the editor workflow encompasses extremely wide needs. Yes, you call that conflating but ultimately many of us do need to consider many, many things when it comes to a UNIX-like environment.
 
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