I personally use Kate
Works great, simple & stable. What more could you ask for in a simple text editor.

Kate is a good editor for X, but, we arent talking about X based editors. Id like a good text based text editor.

correct me if i'm wrong but you ARE editing the contents of a buffer.... even in a full fledged word processor you are still only manipulating the contents of a buffer onscreen, then when you hit the save button it gets written to your file! that's why if you quit without saving, or your computer reboots or loses power before you hit 'save' you lose all your progress... the program loads the file into a buffer in ram which allows you to edit the file then as i said, it writes that buffer to the file when you hit 'save' so that terminology is correct as far as i know.

Don't knock VI man... ask anyone who has gotten used to VI like myself and they will tell you, like I will, that I will use nothing else to edit text

Then i suggest Pico. Its really simple and it gets the job done but not text highlighting and fancy features. Of course Emacs and/or Vi would prob be better for the long haul but why? I mean why would you want to sit around in the console editing programs when you have lovely eye candy like KDE and awesome editors like Kate.

You can always use gvim if you want a gui text editor I guess the problem I have with Kate is I can't do things like global search in replace of the entire file, or a section of a file, in 2 seconds without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. Vi/Vim does take some getting used to but the commands are very powerful once you are used to it. Eyecandy to me doesn't make much sense on a plain text editor. Vim also can do syntax highlighting and auto-tabbing if you want it to... it is easy to set it up to following the linux c coding standards for spacing.

Is this thread still going on? I replied to this a while ago thinking that the guy was serious, but now I think he's just a microsoft shill trolling to cause trouble. If oopicmaster spent half as much time learning how to use an editor like vi or emacs as he does ranting & raving he would have mastered both by now.

My favorite part is the "are there any text editors that mimic Wordpad in Windows". And then he complains about Kate being X based so it doesn't count. Well the only editor that comes with windows for the command line that I know of is DOS Edit, and that is just about the crappiest editor ever as it has almost no features. Of course wordpad is crap for writting code in it's default form because it uses things like smart quotes that screw up a lot of compilers. Plus it has no support as far as I know for anything like syntax highlighting.

Yep... I regret being part of this moronic "debate" too. I seriously thought that this oopicmaster guy wanted a good Java IDE... but all this crap about Wordpad and suddenly not wanting an X based editor.

Some people are just plain lazy or just too idiotic to learn something new every once in a while... ah well

Pico, VI, and the like suck... why? because they dont provide good windowed text based editing, and rely on cryptic proprietary keystrokes, nomenclature, etc.

Good editors (and all good software for that matter) follow standards of user interface design. They dont recreate the wheel thereby forcing users to relearn everything about text editing.

Can a person get used to using crappy software products? Sure.... this topic has proven that to be an unfortunate fact.

Do you know when Vi was created? A man named Bill Joy created it in 1976 when he merged two programs called ed and ex, which were the original Unix programs for editing files. Many of the commands haven't changed much from way back in 1976. The theory behind it's command structure is it enabled the user to keep his hands on the keyboard, and even further then that, only have to use keys easily reachable from the standard home row typing position for the most often used tasks. There was no gui interface and certainly no mouse commands to slow down productivity. Since then, thousands of unix admins, programmers, and other unix people (and later people using BSD, linux, ect ect ect) have learned to be quite productive with it. Would it have been reasonable to change the commands just because somebody came along and built there own arbitrary convention for keystrokes almost 15 years after Vi's original creation when it already had a huge user base that liked it the way it was? I don't think so.

I've been semi-supportive of your complaints, oopicmaster but 'proprietary keystrokes'? *g* That doesn't make any sense. And pico is pretty easy. And that's sort of the thing: vi can do stuff most other editors can't. Which means it's gonna have keybindings most others don't. And if it's going to be different in the superset, it makes little sense to be consistent with other editors' subsets when it can be consistent with itself (not that it entirely is, I guess).

If you are serious about your quest, I just found out that setedit's cousin rhide can be run under Linux. I haven't tested it, personally, but...

http://www.rhide.com/

And mfeat, I don't know a Microsoft shill that would be demanding a console programmer's text editor - he'd be in here claiming AbiWord and OpenOffice sucked compared to MSOffice. Though oopicmaster isn't entirely clear on telling us what he wants, I'll grant. Wordpad doesn't have much to do with c.p.t.e., either.

Maybe I'm just weird and being a pushover. There are a lot of DOS apps that could be ported. Just like with Windows, the system sucks and the apps were limited by the system but the apps were sometimes excellent, all things considered. But, then again, DOS apps don't always share a whole lot of keybindings, either. There's just so damn much to learn with Linux that I can see picking your battles. It can take a lifetime to master vim and maybe time spent figuring out an editor is time you could spend coding on a more familiar editor. I don't buy that, as the text editor is your second most important tool after your shell and the idea of porting command.com so you don't have to learn bash makes me nauseous. But I can at least comprehend the argument of a familiar editor.

i just emerged rhide (Gentoo). It's decent, fairly easy to use. Probably still need to read the manual for some things but i manage to write a "Hello, Robert" program in C, compile it and run it without having to read any instructions. It seemed to automatically find gcc (im guessing maybe it used the path variable maybe but it worked without me telling it anything). im using it with mouse support but im noticing most of the menu options have shortcut keys that are fairly simple but you'd still have to learn em (like to compile i think is ATL+F9).
i still havent figured out if i can get Java apps to compile but if i figure it out i'll post back.

Well... this statement actually bolsters my argument that vi isnt very good. When a design is good, you see it mimicked again and again.

For example... in MANY windows apps... what does ALT-F do? Bring up a file menu... In Kate on linux what does ALT-F do? Bring up a file menu...

If vi is so great, why didnt the vi style of text editor catch on? Where are all of the vi clones?

Same with emacs.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/app...vi/!INDEX.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/app...cs/!INDEX.html

And that's extremely incomplete.

Of course, that argument doesn't necessarily hold one way or the other - you could say 'editor X rules because it's been imitated a thousand times' but you could just as easily say 'editor X sucks because it's taken a thousand attempts to make it usable'. And Alt-F isn't imitated because notepad is a great editor. It's just how MS set up all the standard apps - or maybe Mac - or the Xerox thing. Or whatever. Point is, it's not an editor thing. How often do you use Alt-F, anyway? Ctrl-S or Ctrl-Q or whatever. So <esc>:q or <esc>:wq. It's the <esc> that's the kicker. Modal. And with emacs you get hyper-chordal.