Your preferred text editor and terminal?

[Options]

I've noticed a high preference to one editor or another, etc. I'm using LeafPad and Terminator. What would you recommend and why?

[GekkoP]

Well, if you look at the information right under the profile picture you'll see what everyone uses everyday. :)

As for the why:
- st: because I'm a shameless suckless fanboy. Before that I've been with urxvt for a long while.
- emacs: because I'm a shameless DebianJoe fanboy. Seriously, since I got my hands on it, it's been a long, happy journey.

[rust collector]

If you like using leafpad, and terminator... use that!

I would try an editor that works if your x does not, just in case...
My preferred editor is nano, pretty much because it is included in most debian systems, and it is easy to use.

As for the terminal... Terminator is pretty cool, but I feel it is too slow.
I am not sure what i would recommend there, I just use urxvt, and like it, but it is just a window I can type stuff into...

[DebianJoe]

...oh, you did not open this can of worms.

Ok, here goes: Emacs and stterm in X/emacs-nox and fbterm outside of X.

Reasons: stterm is simple, and by that I mean it's not filled with complex abstractions (such as the split term in Terminator...why not just open a couple of terminal emulators if you're using a wm in X? Plus, tmux is killer for working outside of X, ssh sessions, etc.)

Now, emacs. I do some lisp programming. Since emacs is really just a lisp interpreter, I can make it do some pretty neat things. It has sensible code definitions, and does a magnificent job of dealing with things like Kernel formatted C, auto-indenting brackets, interpreting Python and indenting functions to sane levels.

I also use it for irc (erc), checking my email (wanderlust), a cli file manager (dired), a web-browser (emacs-w3m), a scheme interpreter and matcher (slime + gnu_guile), a bash terminal shell for piping into files for editing (eshell), auto updating plugins when changes are made at the development level (el-get), etc.

It might save me some typing time to just point you to THIS thread where I go into some better detail as to what I do with it.

[bones]

Nano, because it's pretty ubiquitous, and it's simple for me. As for terminal, mostly urxvt, but whatever is available in whatever I'm using is good. Frequently it's just tmux in a no-X/tty session.

[kexolino]

urxvt, pretty much because it's light, and vim, because I once started using it for the lulz, and then fell in love with the way it works (keybindings, plugins, normal/insert/visual mode, and all that). Now I use vim style keybindings in the applications that can do it.

[Options]

Now I believe I see the big deal with Emacs. Gonna give it a shot when I run out of things to do, see if it's for me. I've asked this because I'm trying things, seeing exactly what fits me.

[rhowaldt]

i use Geany because i only live in the CLI parttime :)
urxvt for uhh dunno why anymore. like it, i guess.

[wuxmedia]

I'm happy I can use nano at work, Vi if I have to, but I should learn it - as it default on all work installs.
Totally agree with rust about learning something outside of X, once you're in a broken computer needing to edit a file to bring it back, you will be happy - at least how to save and quit in nano - actually that's pretty much all I know 8)

urxvt - because most of the pretty colours schemes are in .Xresource format and it does native transparency that I just about understand.
Plus it can do hyperlinks OOTB.

[dkeg]

Vim, urxvt

[machinebacon]

I take anything I can get my hands on :looks lasciviously:

Terminal, it is usually some kind of rxvt. Actually I take the default one, as long as it is not a libvte-based one (so _not_ gnome-terminal, terminator, sakura, lxterminal or anything like this)

For a quick and dirty editing, it is nano. If I am in a GUI :looks lasciviously: and I open up leafpad :looks lasciviously: I only use it for easier partial copy-pasting on the laptop without mouse. So, it happens extremely seldom.
In a TTY (I know you pronounce it 'titty') :look lasciviously: I end up with tmux, and if I start writing something, I open up emacs. If I just want to edit a line, it's nano.

[DebianJoe]

Yes, it's probably worth noting that I use nano for when I'm like "I need to comment out this one line," and Emacs for when I'm like "I need to comment out 27 lines consecutively, replace them with something totally different, and then recompile the program that they affect and push changes to git. I use vim for when I'm thinking "Man, I should probably use vim so I don't forget how to save and close a file in vim." ;)

Emacs and vim are really designed as old-school IDEs, so they're good at what they were made for while they may be a bit much for just basic editing. Just to really throw a wrench in things: some of the time, if I'm just changing one line in a file...I'll use cat, sed, some awk aliases I have in zsh, regex, and redirects. There is no reason to do this other than "It's fun."

[machinebacon]

I agree with Joe here. If Emacs, for example, is running all the time, and you actually do all your stuff there inside, it would be quite bullshit to leave the environment to fire up vim. Certain things are not 100% perfect in nano (though I like their 'new' kill/yank function, which allows multiple lines). I guess it's really mostly about what the user has got used to. Something like an automatized behavior, like if you use "more" or "most" or "less", it just simply falls into the hand. If I want to check the source of a script, I nearly automatically enter "nano", because I've done it thousands of times already. Once I replaced nano with pico or nano-tiny， and it was very strange to enter "nano-tiny" or "pico" respectively. "bash: nano: command not found" :) Of course this is different if you are in a GUI environment all the time, you just select the default one in "Applications -> Text Editor" or whatever. There are not many #!ers who use dmenu, especially since dmenu OOTB does not open terminal tools inside of a terminal.

[elixir]

I used to only use Geany and Terminator, but once I switched to the window manager i3 I started using other ones. So now I prefer urxvt terminal and nano as my editor.

[machinebacon]

Elixir got barbecued :) Now get yourself:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install emacs24-nox

and have fun reading the tutorial ;) This is the CLI version, so you can use it 1:1 in a framebuffer or TTY.

[franksinistra]

i use urxvt and vim ( i really like emacs too, especially when combined with conkeror. Very useful to replace firebug)

[RandomCharacter]

I don't care much about terminals, I just use whatever the installation starts.

I usually use vim as if it was vi. However, in my Spring 2014.2 installation, I installed nvi, a clone of the real vi.

Tim

[Options]

Definitely got some good ideas. High quality responses. +1.

[ivanovnegro]

You know, I have this OCD thing going on and moved the topic to /dev/null where it just looks better because it is not a support question. ;)

I use vim. It is a bit what Kexo said. Once I tried it and fell in love with the key bindings and its default behavior and never looked back. Before I used more or less nano.

Urxvt because I simply prefer it to anything else. It reads my colors, has native and fake transparency (though I do not care), has a daemon mode, reads properly and ootb UTF-8 characters, so my damn Cyrillic fonts look nice e.g. because I use the terminal the whole day for all my preferred ncurses apps.

[4eyes]

Gedit - cos I am a big girls blouse.

Terminator - for very similar reasons to the above.

I am an unashamed mouse jockey, and look on all of you who spurn 'mouses' as either Demi-Gods or Rainman Spectrum binary brained loonies.