I'm looking for a semi-advanced text editor for use without X. I need the ability to center or left align text, and to assign basic bold, italics, and underline attributes to the text. A spell checker would be great. By the way, this is for use on a 486/75 laptop with 24 megs of RAM. It has a 3 gig hard drive, so space isn't an issue. It's running Debian stable, so something in Debian's update tree would be best.

EDIT

Oh yea. This would be for writing <i>sketch comedy</i> scripts, not <i>program</i> scripts, so higlighting isn't an issue. Thats what Vim is for.

Emacs?

/disclaimer, I think vim > emacs, but you already ruled out vim.

The without X thing kinda botches up your choices. I recommend Kate, Bluefish, or Crimson Editor under WINE in the X department.

sounds like your looking for a word pocessor. i dont know of any text editors that do what you want, but im sure they are out there. if you want to take the time to learn latex, it makes words look pretty, you would just use vi or emacs to write text with formating tags, then you run it through some sort of compiler type thing that spits out a .dvi file that you can view and print with xdvi or kdvi, or im sure you could just print the dvi from the command line. it may be a little to much work for just wanting to quickly write up some stuff, but its very good for typesetting papers. as for a spell checker, ispell will spell check any text file for you, so you don't have to have it in the text editor/ word processor
ispell filename.txt

hope that helps some

These things are a figment of your imagination,
they don't exist in ASCII :)


I think sirclif is right, what you're after is not a text
editor but a word-processor. I'm not aware of any
word-processors for Linux for the command-line,
with a little luck you may be able to get WP 5.1
for DOS to work on your machine with DOSemu...


Cheers,
Tink

Really? Isn't nroff suitable for this?

It's actually not a text processor, but one can use it time to time to align texts.

even vim will let you justify text, set column width and a few other things. the bold,underline and italics are another story. i am curious though, does anyone know what the 'man pages' are written with?

nroff

sweet

Sure is, but like TeX it needs special tags to
achieve this, and nroff is by no means an
"editor" of any kind.



Cheers,
Tink

here's a good answer

http://acs.ucsd.edu/info/format.php

your gonna have to stick tags in your text file you create with your favorite text editor, and then operate on it with some sort of formatting program. looks like nroff would be simpler to use than latex

good luck