Text Editor of the Year
 

Always an interesting poll.

--jeremy

Only one, begins with 'V', ends with 'im'.

you have a funny way of pronoucing it.

it is spelt Leafpad

grins like a sheep

Trying to pronounce it that way makes my jaw hurt!

You must be one of them foreigners from someplace else! ;)

vim :)

gedit. I usually spend a lot of time with leafpad or nano but i think gedit has the right balance of features and simplicity. Plus i don't have to spend all day learning how to close it ;)

Geany

As "elvis" is not in the list, I chose vi.
elvis is dead, long live elvis

I notice that ed is missing. Whatever happened to keyhole editing? ;)
It is an excellent "remote" editor - stick it in a script instead of awk or sed.

You both spelt it wrong, it's spelt "emacs".

(Sorry, couln't help it :) )

I chose SciTe for the simplicity.

Emacs with viper
 

I voted Emacs but note that I enable the viper vi emulation package...

I use vi - but live and learn, I didn't know Emacs could do that

KWrite in X, nano in console or terminal.
(I've been saying this for 10 years now: I will learn to use Emacs and Vi/Vim sometime.)

Medit. Fast, clean layout, a lot of options, desktop independent too.

It's always v and Im

Oh, come on! I'm pretty sure it's spelled n-o-t-e-p-a-d. I know it's a Windows program, but it runs perfectly on Wine. How can you forget it! There are soooo many features, making it the best IDE ever! You can open, save, and even print! Wow! It even lets you cut, copy, and paste! Amazing!!! You can even search for text and replace it, change the font, and even undo just one step. Oh, and you can... well, I guess that's about it... But man! this thing is jam-packed with features!

sublime_text2 for the DE user space.

vim for console.

Mine always seem to be Nano or Vi. Both are equally as good for my needs.

"Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish." – Neal Stephenson, "In the Beginning was the Command Line"

I'll leave it up to the imagination what I voted for. :p

You sure it's not 'spelled' vim? :)

ISPF

Too bad it doesn't run on Linux.

For a graphical editor, I like Kate. In a terminal, nano.

Geany for coding stuff, and Midnight Commander Editor on the terminal for editing confs.

Notepad on Wine or run Windows 7 on VirtualBox!!!!!!!!1111111111111

Can I change my vote? I voted for Geany on best IDE, would like to change it to MC here...

Once placed, votes in the MCAs cannot be changed.

--jeremy

OK, thank you!

I know Writetype (A word processor not office suite) dose not fit in any where but it rocks. This year I've picked Vi because in a pinch it has always got my back. :)

Emacs

Had to vote nano. I ought to use vi and nano lacks (or has hidden) some features I'd like to see (like copying and pasting parts of text) but I use it for editing all system files and it does the job nicely.

I've installed gpm to make cut and paste easier in my netinst. ;)

Thanks, I'd forgotten I didn't include that last time I installed on my machines. Not exactly what I would like to see in nano but it does do the job.

vim

though i never got used to navigating by hjkl when in command mode due to using the dvorak layout... I should prolly just do it anyways.

Leafpad, Does what I need.

Vi. Don't know if Chuck Norris approves it.

Just as I use a tack hammer for driving tacks and a sledge hammer for driving stakes, so I use nano for simple edits and vim for complex edits. How to choose to vote? I open nano more often, but probably spend more time in vim. I will go with vim, because of the far richer if more difficult to access feature set.

PS - I always love this award!

ed man!

There's the problem with echo. Sometimes it doesn't have "-e", and sometimes bourne shell echo won't expand "\n" (and you can't use "<<<" in sh). The solution is printf:

It's great for doing complex stuff in files, for example go to line 1, copy the line and insert it below, then change all characters to the "=" symbol ("s/./=/g"):

Becomes the markdown-formatted:

I don't know how to do that in sed. awk will get it done, but in ed it's so easy and natural -- just type in the commands like you would have written them while editing.

In addition, I use ed as a console screensaver. When I leave the computer, I just open ed and go to insert mode, confident that no non-nerd will be able to exit it.

However... you don't really use ed for editing, do you? :P As great as it is, I must say vi is more productive. Then again, vi is the heir of ed! ed -> ex -> vi -- the royal bloodline is unbroken. vim didn't add anything useful.

I'm wondering what makes people choose the text-based editors over the graphical ones. Do some people run their distro without a GUI? IMO, a graphical editor like Geany or Kate has all of the features of a text-based one like Nano or Vim, plus it's easier to use with point and click.

For me, it was a tough choice between Kate and Geany, but I chose Geany since it doesn't have KDE dependencies.

some dont use a gui. for the most part, i only use the i3 window manager so that I can run firefox, and multiple terminals side by side where i can copy and paste at will, and the occasional media player.

You never know when you'll have to repair your install from the console, or recover it from ssh. when I was first learning linux, it was difficult (for me) to get a working xorg.conf file, back in 2004, and i would spend hours in the console hacking it together. every linux user should be able to stumble their way through a text based editor, text based web browser, and ssh.

I do have text-based applications and can use them well, but with Cinnamon, the GUI applications are much easier and faster to use.

I love Kate, Geany, KDE, JWM, Xfce and GUIs + + but there's less to go wrong and power consumption in CLI, I rock both on my laptop plus if you ran a sever CLI is all you'd need.

Emacs, of course!

Emacs does both GUI and text-based, so it's the best of both worlds.

Using Emacs, if I need to boot to console only for whatever reason, such as to do a repair or fix a botched config, I am using the same keystrokes as I would normally - rather than a use GUI and when I can't being forced to use vim/nano where doing things are totally different.

Also, if I want to make a quick change, rather than have Emacs load the full GUI, it's a simple switch on the command line "-nw".

Using text-based editors is *the* way to do fast edits over ssh on remote systems. vim comes with text-based and GUI-based (gvim) interfaces, and so do elvis and other vi-clones, but in 99% of the cases ex is also still available.
I even sometimes do ssh access to remote systems from a terminal window on my Android phone to repair problems with customers. ex/text-based-vi is indispensable to me in those cases.

emacs is probably the *only* package that I *blocked* in all my distributions. It adds nothing but bloat and its interface is counterintuitive. When raised with ed and ex in the era that window-based text editors did not exist, tools like emacs are not what I could ever work with. I really tried.

Using the GUI versions of text-editor on native Linux desktops is also for me *the* preferred MO, but it is not always possible.

Then there are OS's that come with none of the wonderful tools a modern Linux distribution has to offer. Try to find emacs, Kate or whatever your favorite (GUI) text editor you have on a braindead distribution like AIX. They still call themselves a Unix distribution, but finding modern OS tools (esp recent version of them) is exceptionally hard. Porting yourself is talking too much time. It *does* however always ship with ex and (old) vi. Knowing those tools will always get you where you need to go. Only knowing text editors that come with modern Linux is not helping you on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Irix and other expensive but rock-steady OS's you might encounter in $work.

Emacs all the way for me especially since I've recently started learning C++, I have my main code window (sometimes two code windows), my ansi-term window, a directory window and IRC running in another window with ERC (for my desperate cries for help :-)). I tried Vim but I found that I just wasn't using the modal switch at all (personal preference of course).

I use Emacs without the frontend just as most Vim users do with Vim (Vim has a frontend if required, just like Emacs does), it's true that Emacs has a lot more functionality than Vim but it's stuff I use and anyway, I find it to be as fast as I could ever want.

That is a typical beginner error. You should be in command mode all the time, only going to insert mode briefly to insert text, and then immediately back to command mode as soon as you're done. You can make .vimrc disable the arrow keys altogether to force you to get used to HJKL (the benefit being that they are on the home row; the first rule of typing is that you should have your left hand's fingers on ASDF and your right hand on JKLÖ).

Nano!
 

Like oatmeal in the morning, it's always there! :) Ric

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that I didn't give Vim enough time to really get into it but the fact is that I know what I'm doing with Emacs and it does everything I want it to, my fingers automatically go to Emacs keybindings even if I'm in some other program lol. Also, (and I ask this because I don't know the answer and not to prove some point), can Vim run IRC, code windows, a terminal, email and a text adventure (I know, I'm old :-)) all windowed at the same time because that's pretty much my standard work environment.

Actually, now that I'm comfortable with Emacs I find point and click interfaces frustrating to say the least, and slow, aaarrgghh!

I am a Vim user, but I definitely share your sentiment about pointy-clicky interfaces!

The over-use of the GUI interface paradigm, and attempting to apply it where not appropriate has been the single greatest impediment to most people's ability to use the simple power of the general purpose computing device to accomplish useful tasks and better their lives.

The clickety-click of fingers on a keyboard is the happy and productive clicky sound!