This is probably an incredibly stupid question to experienced users of Linux, but as someone who is just starting by trying to decide what distro to start out with, and therefore with no experience, I wonder if someone can tell me whether there is an equivalent Linux application to Windows Notepad (which I use for my website coding). Doing it in a regular office application like Word is not practical, so I assume that open office would suffer from the same shortcomings.

So *is* there a notepad equivalent? And if so, is it something that is normally included in a distro or is it a special download, and if the latter, what do you recommend?

Doing a search of this forum before making this post did not seem to turn anything up . . .

Thanks

Bob

There are different. Vi is a command line text editor. There are some GUI programs as well. Every distro has some text editor in it and if it's not the one you want you can just download another.

There are lots of linux ASCII text editors which is what notepad is.

console editors
emacs, vim, joe, pico, jed

xwindows
xemacs, kwrite...

I think GEDIT is pretty decent text editor for the gnome environment (GUI). Also NANO is a great command line (non GUI) based editor a little easeir to use then VI however VI is totally classic and pretty standard across unix based systems .

i personally recomend Quanta (GUI) or Pico (CMD Line)

There is also Nedit (X). It's fairly popular, although I don't like it so much. It's pretty close to a notepad clone, though.

1 members found this post helpful.

I like Kvim and Kate

For website coding, Bluefish is an excellent HTML editor.

Command Line: vi (elvis or vim), emacs, pico (my preffered editor)
X: emacs, vi
KDE: kedit, kvim
Gnome: gedit (kedit & gedit are both very similiar to what you would expect from a simple text editor. Emacs is a much more fully featured editor, among other things that it can do.)

in cmd i personnaly like nano cause i got used to it usin shells before i installed linux
sometimes i use KWrite with KDE

You should take the time to learn vim or emacs if you are interested in getting experienced on Unix systems. one or the other is almost always available and can be used whether there is a gui or not.

in the end it really pays off to know just the basics of one of these

i agree that you ought to learn vim (or even nano), but Gedit is probably the closest thing to the more basic notepad (edt: or one of the kde text editors, kedit, kate, etc.). nedit is good, too, if you don't want use kde or gnome and don't want to install a bunch of libraries.

See if Leafpad does what you want. It's a Notepad lookalike for Linux, very fast.

Go to: http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/

I use Kate for editing text. It's bundled with KDE, so doesn't need to be installed separately.

iv always liked KWrite, which is effectively the same thing as Notepad

kedit and gedit are the closest thing to notepad.

kwrite, and kate are more sophisticated versions for KDE, and I'm sure Gnome has its equivalents of these.

I'd learn a command line one as well vim, for instance. Its always handy to know.