What is your favorite text editor?

reduced accessibility
A blind person would perhaps prefer ed to ee, he would prefer commands to menus.

The circumstances play a big role. The line editors were used on teletypes. On a teletype
you cannot move back and forwards, up and down with a cursor, there you cannot use vi
or emacs. Today we use ed in scripts, that is also not possible with vi or emacs,
perhaps also not with the so simple and non cryptic ee.
 
I would imagine that an additional (optional) selection “default editor/shell/pager” with an implicit package installation could make sense.
This is where I feel it gets hairy. Lets say someone chooses vi, sh, more (so the other packages don't get installed i.e if the future PkgBase allows this).
Any scripts that they run may require ed, csh, less. These would then break giving bizarre errors.

The "set in stone" concept of base is there not just for what we like but in many ways interoperability. vi,ee,ex,ed are all fine. It is when people start to remove any of them because they "prefer others" that they start to trash base.

Unless you meant always keep those 4 base editors but add more during install. We did used to have that feature in the older sysinstall (around FreeBSD 8 and prior). It just added needless complexity when this can all be done post-install. One of the reasons bsdinstall was made to simplify it.
 
Unless you meant always keep those 4 base editors but add more during install. We did used to have that feature in the older sysinstall (around FreeBSD 8 and prior). It just added needless complexity when this can all be done post-install. One of the reasons bsdinstall was made to simplify it.
I also think that one must have first a base system, and then customise it after the install. Sysinstall allowed
much more possibilities to reach the base install that I miss in bsdinstall. OpenBSD installer, in spite
of its simplicity, or perhaps due to it, also allows more possibilities. To delete things like ed or vi means
departing from standards, that should be done at owns risc.
 
Once again, why do people need to be constantly reminded of only 22 editor commands? Then, again, I don't use 22 different commands when I do every day editing in vim so does that make ee more complicated?
I don't. Once I open the EE window to edit or create the file it's no different than using Leafpad to me.

I Copy&Pasted that Eleven Elves sentence in one continuous line from my site. Used the arrow button to get the the word I wanted to use as a break to fit window, hit Enter and it goes to the next line just like Leafpad.

When I'm done it's a matter of hitting Esc, it will ask if I want to leave EE without saving, give me the chance to save and I'm outta here.
Today we use ed in scripts, that is also not possible with vi or emacs,
perhaps also not with the so simple and non cryptic ee.
If it can be written on Leafpad it can be written in EE. I'll borrow some perl from Useful Scripts here in the forum, open ee in sh and save it as /usr/home/jitte/ppp_check.sh:

Pearl.png


The saved file opened in Leafpad:

/usr/home/jitte/ppp_check.sh:
Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl

use Net::Ping;

$server_to_ping="ya.ru";


sub check_ping_server
{
$host_alive=1;
$ping=Net::Ping->new('icmp');
if( $ping->ping($_[0]) ) { $host_alive=1;}
 else  {$host_alive=0;}
return $host_alive;
}



if(!check_ping_server($server_to_ping))
    {
    system("killall ppp");
    system("sleep 2");
    # Start PPP ADSL connection
    system("/usr/sbin/ppp -quiet -ddial adsl");
    # Send the message to
    system("echo PPP restarted by timeout...");
    }

exit;

Now what's wrong with that, pray tell?
 
shell, quick edits and viewing: vi
editing mutliple files doing copy/paste: kate
lengthy editing sessions, possibly running gdb as well: Qt Creator
when other editors not available: gvim, gedit
previously used: netbeans, xemacs
potential future use: vscode
 
(1) You are trashing the forum with unnecessary images.
Are you critiquing my desktop? My skills as a graphic artist? Reprimanding me? Moderating me? Banning me from the thread? Sub-forum? Forums? Stating your opinion, like one of which everyone has? Or just being one?

BTW, it was you that went off-topic with the mention of removing EE from the base system in the sh or csh thread that got it moved here, hruodr, not me. I replied to your post. Let's be clear on that point.

Well, my posting was more or less irony and you knew it. "who cares today", insinuating no one, means
perhaps few, perhaps in absolute numbers lots as you say.
As to who is trashing the forums and contributing to the forums? That's up for grabs, but stats to the good are on my side. To your left, hruodr.


(2) I was not speaking about opening a script with an editor, but about calling the editor in the script.
Thank you for clarifying that. To be brutally honest, I really had no idea what you were talking about:

The circumstances play a big role. The line editors were used on teletypes. On a teletype
you cannot move back and forwards, up and down with a cursor, there you cannot use vi
or emacs. Today we use ed in scripts, that is also not possible with vi or emacs,
perhaps also not with the so simple and non cryptic ee
 
Are you critiquing my desktop? My skills as a graphic artist? Reprimanding me? Moderating me? Banning me from the thread? Sub-forum? Forums? Stating your opinion, like one of which everyone has? Or just being one?
Just pointing out that an image needs much more bytes than a little of eqivalent text, and that the forum has limited space.
 
I think I will use ee with a background now as well.

I have got millions of pictures. I might post ee with a background of only some of them.

Oh look! ESC-Enter: exit Now I know how to get out!

s1.jpg
 
I am bike shedding here. Though certainly conflicted because:

1) One of the best features of a text based editor (or text-based anything) is that it can be posted in plain-text, allowing for easy copy/search. Many programming forums even ban screenshots of code.

However...

2) I also do quite like seeing pictures of UNIX software, including desktops (I am a nerd after all ;)) and I feel the mailing lists miss out on this a little.
 
I don't understand why people can get so emotional about a default text editor. It's just about making life easier for the most people, not to prevent anyone from using whatever preferred tool.

Like grahamperrin I think the best solution would be to be able to choose this in the installer at the user creation stage. I mean, both vi and ee are in base (we're not talking about adding stuff) and we're likewise asked for the default shell to use, so editor choice could easily be offered at this point and everyone would be satisfied.

This "if you can't use vi you're not good enough to use FreeBSD" attitude shown by some people is plain stupid. I've never used vi but I'm perfectly comfortable using FreeBSD as my only operating system everyday. So happily do many other people around the world. I suppose we should all stop using it and buy a Mac instead, because we don't belong to the elite of veteran UNIX gurus?
 
Back when things were much simpler, some of us used cat for writing new programs (if expected to be short). Only if the program had some syntax or logic error did we switch to vi (or another editor). Of course, you had to have a pretty good idea of what the program was supposed to do before you got started but that is a generally a good thing in any case! Even now I some time start short programs thus: > foo.c ; cc foo.c && a.out ... but that is just out of laziness.

Emacs has rectangular cut and paste.

EVE had it in the 80s on the VAX.
The RAND editor had it since late '70s. It had a number of operations on rectangular selections: draw a box, erase, replace, overlay, underlay, pipe through an external program etc. I used it in preference to vi for a number of years (starting in '81 or '82). It was one of the easiest editors to teach people who were not computer savvy. While there were control-char shortcuts for common commands, pretty much every command could be executed from the command line using their easy to remember names. It also provided multiple windows (you could split any window horizontally or vertically). It had no undo command but you could abort the editor and replay your keystrokes!
 
Emacs has rectangular cut and paste.
Yes. I use rectangular cut and paste from time to time. My problem with emacs:

Code:
# ll /usr/opt/emacs-26.3/bin/emacs-26.3
-rwxr-xr-x  1 opt  opt  59986208 Jul 12 06:26 /usr/opt/emacs-26.3/bin/emacs-26.3*
# ldd /usr/opt/emacs-26.3/bin/emacs-26.3
/usr/opt/emacs-26.3/bin/emacs-26.3:
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x800a31000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x800c39000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x800e53000)
        libX11-xcb.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libX11-xcb.so.1 (0x801199000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0x80139a000)
        librt.so.1 => /usr/lib/librt.so.1 (0x8015c4000)
        libexecinfo.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexecinfo.so.1 (0x8017ca000)
        libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/local/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x8019cd000)
        libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x801bd7000)
        libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/local/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x801dd9000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x801fde000)
        libutil.so.9 => /lib/libutil.so.9 (0x8021f0000)
        libncurses.so.8 => /lib/libncurses.so.8 (0x802404000)
        libthr.so.3 => /lib/libthr.so.3 (0x802659000)
        libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0x802881000)
        libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x802ab1000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x802e68000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x80306b000)
        libelf.so.2 => /lib/libelf.so.2 (0x803270000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x803488000)
        libXrender.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x8036a0000

Every time a new version appears, I must struggle with the configuration files in order that
it continue behaving as I know it since decades. And I used it in machines with few ram. I
suspect, this is bloat. Is it not?
 
Every time a new version appears, I must struggle with the configuration files in order that
it continue behaving as I know it since decades.

Although I can not confirm this, I feel the urge to remind everyone that, if your configuration files break your editor, it's not your editor that is "incompatible".
 
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