A good graphical text editor for GNOMEless KDEless computer...
 

Hi all--

Before switching to slackware I was using ubuntu and they had gEdit that ran for both XFCE and GNOME. However, it appears that gedit is a gnome specific application.

I'm using the fluxbox window manager because it actually runs fast on my old POS computer. (even XFCE gets a little boggy)

But i really like gedit because it was simple. I'm tired of using the console vi. It's good. And I learned to love it when trying to get XWindows to start...but now that I'm in X I want something simple...Gedit is simple. So naturally I tried to get it working...

I downloaded gedit from the website, untarred it, ran ./configure which died requesting gnome-doc-utils. So I got those, ./configure worked but the "make" choked asking for OTHER gnome utilities. I decided gedit wasn't going to happen easily without chasing down a zillion dependencies.

So my question is, is there a good, simple, Gedit like text editor that will work in my computer onto which I didn't install KDE or GNOME?

Other threads I've seen mention kate (but that seems to require kde), cooledit (seems a bit too fancy for what I'm looking for), and emacs (which requires a little more brain power than I'm willing to expend...I'm still working on learning vi =). Any other suggestions? Or perhaps anyone have a simple suggestion to get GEDIT to work without gnome?

Thanks!

These are mainly for editing source code in many different languages, but can be used as regular text editors too.
scite (Much like gedit. I use it all the time.)
nedit (The version I had seemed a little buggy?)
beaver (I haven't used this in a long time.)

mousepad

..if you're one of those Notepad-oriented people :)

Of course GEdit works without the whole Gnome, but you will need the Gnome libraries, so probably it's not what you want. Except if you intend to run other GTK apps too.

I tried beside others nedit (Sepero mentioned it) and medit which I like most: http://mooedit.sourceforge.net/

If you are not doing programming in general, Nedit is superb.
If programming, SciTE is the best.
I havent tried others.

You can also try jext.

You can also give JEdit a try. It's quite powerful with tons of plugins available, albeit a bit slower than native executables.

Actually, that is what I was thinking, and that is why I suggested jext. It is also based on Java, and is also based on Python... which means it is not as slow as JEdit and is quite powerful editor.

It is, though, not actively developed, (last release from July 7, 2004). Still is quite powerful; and a lot for beautiful than JEdit :).

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to try a few out. I think I may use jedit as the text editor simply because I have the runtime environment since I do program in java from time to time.
I also really like jedit because it lets you select the character you want for newlines.

So here's a somewhat unrelated question, when I installed slackware I was careful to ensure that the GTK and GTK2 libraries were installed from the L package series. So are most GTK apps compiled simply against the GTK/GTK2 libraries, or do they also depend on a ton of other gnome libraries+binaries like doc-utils, scroll-view etc?

Thanks!

bluefish if you want something easy to use.

since you said you have an old comp it doesn't make sense to run a bloated java-based editor.

and Emacs is great because you can run it in an x-terminal or natively from the console and still have a shell on one frame and your code in another and a directory listing in another...

leafpad is another alternative

tobyl

In my download area here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../Applications/
You'll find nedit and scite as well as cooledit, gnotepad+, gxedit, mp.
I nearly always use scite for text files, cooledit if I want to edit binary files. Sometimes use nedit still, if scite highlighting doesn't agree with some code.

Why not use gvim, part of every Slackware?
Can be used with the "vi" feel (using ESC to get into command mode for instance) and with additional menu bar, or be used in "insert mode" where it feels like any other graphical editor. The gvim menus contain loads of cool tools and shortcuts.

Eric

I think nedit is one of the best. But don't compile it from source, use the binary ... certain versions of libs will break some features. (this happened to me several times)

gvim huh? I've been tinkering with it since you suggested it and I really like it. I'm going to go through the tutorial and documents.

One of the problems with Slackware is that it was hard to remember what all programs I included during the install program. I'm certain there are 14,000 really cool programs I don't even know are on my system. I'm going to go through the packages and read some of the text that went whizzing by during the install...

Thanks for all the help everyone. I'm going to try out everything. I liked nedit. It's pretty easy to use and decently good looking despite the motif look and feel. (not that I can complain with a 4MB graphics card =)

You can either browse /var/log/packages or use pkgtool option v to see what you have on your system. If you install anything from source or from some other method you can use other tools to keep track of what's installed on your system- there are many threads on this- search for checkinstall, slackbuild, etc.