Comments on: 20 Text Editors for Linux [Overview & Screenshots]

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:04:25 +0000

Maybe I’ll get the time to do it in the days to come. Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:56:41 +0000

I agree that you should include a table of some of the more popular features and indicators for the editors that support the feature, just as someone else mentioned. That would be a very useful table indeed.

By: notJoe

notJoe — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:21:53 +0000

I realize the article didn’t include emacs & vi purposely, saying they were ignoring IDE’s. I think this is a mistake. You can use both only as text editors, learning keystrokes, etc, then moving on to more advanced functions as needed.

Vi and emacs are the only 2 editors I’ve used in 30 years on Unix/Linux systems work. Vi first, then emacs for the past 20 years.

By: notJoe

notJoe — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:10:52 +0000

How can you write an article on linux text editors and not mention emacs* or vi*?

*emacs, xemacs, vi, vim, etc.

By: voidptr

voidptr — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:24:04 +0000

You should rename this article to “20 Other Text Editors You Might Use If Vim Didn’t Exist”.

By: A. C.

A. C. — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:08:51 +0000

JEdit allows you to write macros, I added syntax expansion macros to mine.

A judicious choice of plugins make JEdit a small-scale IDE. Not quite full featured like Eclipse or NetBeans, but you can have edit, simple project management, repository access, code and object browsing, build and run plugins all in the JEdit editor. I know a couple of other Java programmers that have configured their JEdit with plugins so that they can develop rapidly and efficiently.

By: milt

milt — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:27:47 +0000

I use e3 when I’m in a terminal. Small and takes Wordstar commands. I fought my way through a 240 page manual on WS in ’81 and don’t want to waste it:-)

By: Beast

Beast — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:54:16 +0000

You forgot the editor which many describe as G.O.A.T (The Greatest Of All Time).

VIM

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 17:32:56 +0000

NEdit hasn’t been updated in many years. And what about JEdit? It’s Java based (may be a plus or minus) and is one of the few that is completely configurable. Those of us who are looking at a screen most of the day may not want a cursor that is a single, blinking vertical line. It’s too difficult to try and find it when paging through a program. JEdit is the only editor that I have found that allows cursor configuration.

By: some guy

some guy — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:39:26 +0000

vim. the end

By: Abe

Abe — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:44:21 +0000

It would have been much better and more beneficial article if you had made a table listing all editors in rows and features and capabilities an editor should have in columns. Go through each feature and indicate if each editor supports it and how good its support is.

Hard work, definitely. But it would be a great reference for any one who appreciates good effort.

By: Jeff Johnston

Jeff Johnston — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:27:45 +0000

You should give CodeSlayer a try! CodeSlayer is a source code editor that I have been working on for about a year now. It is written in C using the GTK+ toolkit.

The website is http://codeslayer.org.

My motivation for creating CodeSlayer is it seems that the base functionality of other editors try to do too little or too much. With CodeSlayer the base functionality will always be useful across any language, and then we can create plugins that are useful for specific things. But within that context there is so much that we can do.

For instance with CodeSlayer you get a projects tree that can hold multiple projects in a group. And then you can have multiple groups in which you can easily flip back and forth between them. It even remembers the tabs that you had opened with a given group so that you do not lose your place. For finding things CodeSlayer includes an inline search and replace, as well as a really nice global search. The editors in CodeSlayer use GtkSourceView so by default you get all the features of syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, line numbering, etc… In the future I want to build in a bookmarking system and multiple clipboards.

For everything else CodeSlayer has what I believe to be one of the easiest and most powerful plugin systems. How it works is you implement two to three (depending on your needs) methods in your plugin and then you get passed one object that contains everything you need to add your own functionality. Right now the featured plugin is an autotools plugin so that you can compile code for projects that use the autotools system. Then soon I will be releasing the ctags plugin that allows you to jump right to a tag definition.

The other thing you will notice about CodeSlayer it that the interface is very clean. I never found myself using toolbars or status bars so I just left them off.

-Jeff Johnston

By: istok

istok — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:55:12 +0000

gvim made very easy = cream.
i use gui text editors as word processors, btw xD
i guess i’m lucky work allows for it, because i mostly just need pure spellchecked text.