Hello

I can use vi/nano well enough to get around, but I wish there were an editor that would work like Windows' Notepad, ie. no need to switch between edit/command mode all the time, the Home/End/Page(Up|Down)/Ins/Del keys and the arrow keys would work as expected, I would no longer get the familiar "ABCD"'s when using the arrow keys in edit mode in vi, etc.

Do you know if anyone has written a Notepad-like editor for Linux, or are the above still what people use?

Thank you.

Hi -

There's lots of 'em: Kate, KEdit, gEdit, Mousepad, etc etc etc

Q: Have you gone to your distro's "start button" or "taskbar" equivalent and looked? There are bound to be several good options pre-packaged with your distro.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

The first place I look when I want to find a program is my distributions package manager ("apt-cache search", in this case). I usually can find something to use within a couple of tries. Failing that there's always google.

Thanks for the tip. I forgot to say I wanted a command-line alternative to vi/Emacs. I knew about Nano but its lack of support for even the arrow keys turned me off.

For those interested in the same thing: Joe is pretty close to Notepad for the command line.

However, by default, it doesn't seem to support those keys:
- CTRL-C/CTRL-V for copy/pasting
- The Home/End keys don't work
- The PageUp/PageDown just scroll what's in the terminal window (SecureCRT) instead of scrolling within the document currently edited in Joe

If any Joe guru reads this, are those keys just not supported in Joe, or can something be done to enable them?

Thank you.

Correction: nano does support the arrow keys, but just like Joe, doesn't suppor the other important keys (Home/End, etc.)

Update: After logging on directly to the Linux host, I notice that the Home/End and PageUp/Down do work.

So the issue is getting those to work over a terminal application from Windows.

vi(m) is a command-line editor (gvim is GUI)
You can run emacs in cli: emacs -nw

"leafpad" is pretty much like Windows notepad.

If you start joe with the command jstar you have an editor which uses Wordstar compatible keystrokes if that helps you.

Home/End, PgUp/PgDn all work in the way expected.

You leave with Ctrl-K-X (save) or Ctrl-K-Q (no-save), which is of course the most important while you are caught in a new editor.

Notepad can't even stand in the shade of joe.

jlinkels

Thanks for the tip.

Update for those interested: The above keys work OK in Joe by connecting through Putty 0.60 but not on SecureCRT 5.1 (at least with the default settings.) So it's just the usual headache of terminal emulation.

Well I know you listed it as a criteria that ctrl-v and such should work in the editor you are looking for, but I do find it interesting when people
can clearly see how an editor like vi(m) surpasses anything that any other editor can do under Windows and then say but I would like this feature
from Windows back.

Just as a small example, I am curious how under Notepad you might copy an entire line? Your ctrl-c/ctrl-v are not going to help you until you have used a
combination of other keys. And yet, 'yy' does the job instantly.

Sorry for what may seem an inappropriate rant

leafpad is good as Mr Alex says, but it is not cli

It's OK, I'm just tired of vi and eg. the endless i/ESC shuffle, and wanted to make sure there weren't something closer before giving up and just using a Windows editor to edit Linux files through Samba.

Joe is pretty much what I was looking for, although I'll have to find why some dead keys don't work through my terminal.

Another issue I just found: When pasting code, the first line is cut, and each line is further indented:

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/4...jaggedtext.jpg

If someone's seen this and knows what to tweek in Ubuntu, I'm all ears.

Thank you.

No syntax highlighting? That's just lame.

That seems to be a terminal emulation issue again or, in any case, this pasting is not handled correctly by joe. The problem is that joe doesn't know anything about pasting like this. You paste in a terminal, and the terminal sends the characters to joe. It is simply not well interfaced.

I have not found a workaround in the past 10 years, but it is corrected fast manually by putting your cursor where you want the line to begin and press CTRL-T to delete up to the first non-blank characted. If you use joe instead of jstar, check the help to see it thisis CTRL-T indeed.

jlinkels