When I'm working at a Windoze box, I often use Wordpad for quickness rather than MS Word which is overkill for short memos, pasting text for printing etc. I wondered what is the nearest Linux equivalent to Wordpad?

From what I remember - wordpad is sort of a middle ground between notepad and word. It's interface is like notepad, but provides minimal rich text support. On linux you could go with AbiWord (much lighter than OO.org), Koffice or could find a LaTeX editor (though I know nothing about LaTeX other than many people love it) If you don't need the rich text features then there are plenty of simple editors for linux - scite, mousepad, gedit, and kwrite to name a few. Hope that helps.

Thanks for the prompt reply. The rich text capability is important as without it you can't get proper formatting from anything received by e-mail or copied from the Web. I've never used Latex either but I'm given to understand that it is very powerful and has a lot of commands that have to be learned. Maybe that's for later. I'm really after something, as you say, that is lighter and simpler than the usual word processor but with rich text support.

I second the recommendation for Abiword. But if that doesn't cut it for you, try Kate.

Latex isn't a text editor itself. You use it to create a "perfect" layout with any editor you like (either directly or after writing your plain text). While it does have it's own formatting commands, they're actually very easy and fast to learn. Once you can work with latex, you'll never have to bother about "what editor should I use" again

Yes, Abiword is probably what you want (unless you're a die-hard KDE user).

Yves.

I'm searching for something similar, and this thread caught my attention. I thought I'd reply and maybe bump it up and get some new info?

All I need is the ability to select font, font size, bold, italics, line spacing, and save as an .rtf file. That is all I want, nothing more, nothing else at all. "show invisible characters" might be the only other option I'd consider, but I definitely don't need it.

But the closest I found was a program called Ted, which had potential, but seems to have stopped development and seems buggy. Line spacing is odd, it doesn't save tab and paragraph breaks.

My first thought was Abiword might eb faster than OOwriter, but I wasn't sure. It's just an impression based on visible features seen when using the program. So I tested it:

user@user-laptop:/media$ time oowriter
real 0m1.985s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.008s

user@user-laptop:/media$ time abiword
real 0m4.784s
user 0m1.164s
sys 0m0.048s

user@user-laptop:/media$ time oowriter
real 0m1.848s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.004s

user@user-laptop:/media$ time abiword
real 0m2.918s
user 0m1.088s
sys 0m0.084s

user@user-laptop:/media$ time abiword
real 0m3.441s
user 0m1.104s
sys 0m0.056s

user@user-laptop:/media$ time oowriter
real 0m1.855s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.012s

Every timed result seemed to show OOwriter was in fact faster than Abiword. That's not what I expected, but it's hard for me to find evidence that Abiword is faster.

Any thoughts? Any other applications to try?

you could try Kate

Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong kate, but the kate I know of isn't a wysiwyg text editor that saves as .rtf, it's a general text editor with lot's of extra stuff for programmers, like highlighting and color coding different types of statements.

For things that have no wysiwyg, a straight text editor like gedit is much smaller and lighter than kate. And if that's all you want, you can try nano, or my favorite jed in a terminal, or xjed for mouse interactive menus.

I'm giving Ted another shot. I just wish there was a gted or kted or something that used something more modern than lesstif. Anyway, Ted info is at http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/

Ted is faster, but it still has a bit more stuff than I need in it. I really don't see a Linux equivalent to Microsoft's WordPad in any of these suggestions. WordPad is a small wysiwyg text editor with some basic formatting features.

I was looking for a wordpad equivalent as well, OO is too bulky... I tried KWord (from the KOffice suite) and its pretty nice. I don't like it quite as much as Wordpad (because I really wanted bare bones simplicity, it helps me type articles better without all the fanciness around), but it loads fast.

I still haven't resolved this one myself. Abiword just came across as a somewhat lighter word processor but still with far more features than I needed, ditto Kword. And although I didn't go to the trouble of timing Abiword it didn't seem any faster than Oowriter and this is born out by BadlandZ's tests.
I'd sort of given up, but if there's still interest in the topic I'll take up the search again.

Mikie

Sorta gives you something to think about next time someone says Windows is bloated.

Ted is driving me nuts, if I hit (enter) then (tab), half the time it works, half the time doesn't. Every time I change position with arrow keys, up, then to the end of the line again, (enter) then (tab) for a new paragraph, it doesn't put the tab in! How much more broken could it get, new paragraphs are pretty key to using a word processor.

I've sort of given up, and write mostly in jed or gedit, and then open the text file in oowriter when I'm done to do some quick formatting. But I hear WordPad might work in Wine, I wonder if the layer of Wine compatibility will slow it down enough to make it pointless?

Hy, you can use Ted, get it from http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted, or just sudo apt-get install ted. It is really nice, eaven if it's old.

Are there any new, or overlooked old, ASCII raw text editors for Linux?

Try http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/