There is only one thing a text editor needs
It just needs to be vi
Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash
When I heard, in a tutorial video, the multi-platform programmer's editor Sublime described as "the cool kids' code editor" (or possibly "the Cool Kid's code editor" - the speaker didn't enunciate his capitals and apostrophes very clearly) I was puzzled. As the goto (or, rather, the call-by-reference) consultant on Agile Harlem …
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Tuesday 12th March 2013 00:10 GMT RegGuy1
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
vi = virtually impossible.
Which is a lie. There is only one editor...
vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, vi, ...
VI.
Simples. It's been around for at least 30 years. Even VIM isn't really an improvement. You can't improve on the core of vi, it's just too cool.
Of course those who down vote it are obviously ignorami, and have never used it in anger. If you use it in anger it saves your bacon -- EVERY TIME.
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Monday 11th March 2013 14:02 GMT Rolf Howarth
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
You don't know how true your statement about vi running everywhere. I was won over by vi when I absentmindedly tried launching it to edit something when logged on via an ASR-33 teletype..... and IT STILL WORKED !!
Ok, so it had switched to ex mode and was printing out one line at a time, but all the commands and shortcuts worked as normal and it was completely usable. Quite brilliant I thought (especially as I'd never used ex prior to that, or probably since either).
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Monday 11th March 2013 15:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
"VI, the only editor that you can count on to be installed anywhere you are doing onsite support."
EXACTLY. Doesn't matter if you love or hate it. It's fast, light, works on even quite a badly fubar-ed system and can be found all over the place. Time spent learning it is more than worthwhile.
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Monday 11th March 2013 14:14 GMT Wemb
Re: Speaking of Emacs, ....
I use emacs, but to be fair to the others, it must rank as some of the most bloated software ever written. I mean, how many text editors really need at least one adventure game; a tower of Hanoi simulator; Tetris; pong; an implementation of Eliza; a random gibberish generator -and- a mode to plug the random gibberish generator into Eliza?
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Monday 11th March 2013 17:02 GMT eulampios
Re: Speaking of Emacs, ....
Taking this as an insult. Since, even if you use it, you don't really seem to know it. AMOF, I don't really play games in Emacs. First, think how much space does it take? How fast does it load? Run this( in Emacs with M-! or M-1 M-!)
dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-size}\t${Package}\n' |\
column -t | grep -P 'emacs.*' | \
awk '
{sum+=$1}
END{
printf "-------------------------\nTotal for emacs: %.3f Mb\n",sum/2^10
}'
Outputs:
-------------------------
Total for emacs: 145.402 Mb
BTW, why does ELReg text parser mutilate the text so bad and both pre,code tags are so ugly???
Most of it is Elisp, it is modular and 145Mb really worth it! Here is why for me, personally:
**incremental (regex) search, where you get search results for a pattern while you're typing it in ; configurable regex system
**grep-mode, you do grep command and get a *grep* buffer with the list of matching lines hyper-linked to the place/file
**this idea, that everything is file... I mean a buffer is implemented, special buffers
**run-shell command on a region with or without an argument (M-1) M-|
**very smart keyboard shortcuts, which you can configure and customize to your own liking
** collection of text killing macros, can your editor know what zap-to-char is anyone? Capitalize, change-toupper/lower and so on. Very efficient text editing. I am so used to it I use in Firefox.
**running every command with M-x with an autocompletion
**calc-mode, a Reverse-Polish with inf. precision calculator that can integrate, differentiate, convert units etc. Both stand-alone and embedded. And hey, you can still run pari-gp, (i)maxima, octave in in its own buffer and yes run-shell on a region with dc?
**tramp-mode
**kill-ring browser
**dired-mode, where you can do operation on files and dirs (with tram-mode via ssh remotely)
**unmatched extendibility
**predefined highlighting and indentation, regex highlighting etc
**aspell and calendar-mode
** hey, it got a vi emulation mode, viper-mode. I do like vim (vi is too plain), does vim have an emacs mode? ;-)
** its own terminal-mode, which is Okay
**org-mode, info-mode, tex-mode, w3m-mode ( a decent web browser) and you-name-ti-mode
=============
Wow, this is just 5% of what it can do and I just don't have an idea about it.
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Monday 11th March 2013 12:46 GMT jai
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
i use a text editor as a tool, to make life easier. i could just concat all my code onto the end of a file, i guess, but using a text editor makes it easier to spot mistakes and type in lots of text.
having to type in the commands to control the app as well as type in the text i'm typing doesn't make life easier at all.
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Monday 11th March 2013 19:48 GMT Dazed and Confused
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
> having to type in the commands to control the app as well as type in the text i'm typing doesn't make life easier at all.
Well not many people have a telepathy interface, so you've got to find a way to feed the commands into the editor as well as the text. With vi the commands are fed in with the keyboard, originally because that was all that was available. They wanted to be able to use it on all makes of terminal so didn't rely on their being buttons available for all the functions they wanted. But this proved to be its great strength because if you can touch type, even of the random finger selection kind then its bloody quick to use because you don't even have to move your hands. Personally I hate the stupid PC keyboard layout because some damn fool idiot put the [Esc] key out of reach, whereas an IFT keyboard had it just outside the left shift key within easy striking mode. GUIs and mice might be ever so beginner friendly, but all that moving hands around kills the productivity. You end up having to remember all the shortcut key sequences which reduces the so called friendly editor to being just a pale imitation of vi.
But if you can't find vi, ed's not bad either.
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Monday 11th March 2013 15:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Two men sitting at the bar ...
one of them turns to other and asks "What's your IQ?". The other responds "161. Whats yours?". The first man responds "159. What do you think of quantum entanglement and the parametric scattering method of producing photon pairs?". The two then proceed to have a discussion and became friends for life.
A little further down the bar 2 other blokes had seen this and one turns to other and says "My IQ is 120 what is yours". He gets the reply "118. What did you think of the Man U v Chelsea match?". They have a long discussion about all things sport and strike up a lifelong friendship.
Even further down the bar were 2 other blokes who had seen all of this. One turns to other and says "My IQ is 70" and the other responds "Mine is 71. Do you prefer vi or emacs?".
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Monday 11th March 2013 22:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
...A journal. I remember (I blame the COBOL thread for making me reminisce) the 'full-screen' editor on a DEC VAX 11/780 that simply journalised every editing action. Was fun to crash out of a long editing session, restart the editor and sit back and watch it re-apply every key-stroke up to the point of the crash. Did rectangular-block copy&paste too.
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Thursday 14th March 2013 18:40 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
I remember (I blame the COBOL thread for making me reminisce) the 'full-screen' editor on a DEC VAX 11/780 that simply journalised every editing action.
EDT/TPU. I also have fond memories of it, from the days when I had to write VAX assembly code over a 1200bps dialup connection that would frequently drop for no good reason. Curse, dial back in, log back in, run the recovery and watch all my uncommitted changes be replayed. Lovely.
Re the COBOL mention: My preferred editor is vi - actually vim - and I write COBOL code in it more days than not. (Most of the code I work on these days is in either C or COBOL, though there's a smattering of each of at least a dozen other languages.) I have hacked vim to add a bit more support for when I must use COBOL's old-style fixed format rather than nice modern free format, and added some keywords to vim's cobol.vim syntax file, but aside from that it does just fine.
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Monday 11th March 2013 09:35 GMT Troy Peterson
Crimson Editor
My favourite editor by far on Windows is Crimson Editor (Also known as Emerald editor). Sadly, it's no longer developed... But still available. I use it extensively at work. It is a little bit slow at starting up, but not too horrendous.. It's still faster than any of my IDEs by far. Out of any editor I've ever used it has the best macros, block editing, and regex functionality. Block Editing is a godsend... I guess that's what you call multiple cursors here. Crimson is the first editor I ever saw that implemented it and it's still the best. A sizeable amount of my daily work consists of 'TARDEP' tasks... A lot of converting lists of data into SQL inserts and such... and the Block editing is the only way to go.
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/english/home.html
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Monday 11th March 2013 09:39 GMT Jaruzel
My Preferred Editor is...
(And this is just MY opinion and I'm NOT saying anyone else should be swayed by it.)
UltraEdit-32. Version 12b to be exact. On Windows.
Yes, it's old, Yes it's a bit clunky in places. But it loads massive files in a flash, has user configurable syntax and colour highlighting, and the must-have feature for me... the ability to add a button or menu entry to launch other programs with the currently edited file (or automatic temporary copy if not recently saved) as a parameter.
I'm also very lazy, and after 12 or so years using UltraEdit, I'm not inclined to use/learn anything else.
-Jar
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