Since I saw a lot of opinions about vi, nano, pico, Emacs, etc…
I thought maybe i can learn from your experiences.
I started using Emacs last year and found it very intuitive and easy to learn. It behaves like any other text editor, with the bonus of highlighting reserved words in whatever programming/scripting language you happen to be using at the time. Also now and again I run into a little keyboard shortcut to do something a bit faster.
I started trying to use vi, with high expectations, after hearing about it in this forum a few months ago; it seems to do the job ok, but I want to just get on with things without having to learn all the shortcuts right away.
I’m gonna get round to learning how to use vi one day… but I have a handful of programming languages to learn first.
I remember having to use emacs at unversity (20+ years ago) in a mainframe environment. I hated the way the learing curve with using a lot of apps and utilites overshadowed the actual task assigned to us.
In the case of editing a text file, I just want to get the job done quickly and intuitively. Thinking your way around an editor shouldn’t dominate the task. Pico is this convenient tool for me.
Can’t say I really manually edit files too much other than fstab and xorg.conf on new installs. So for a novice like me kwrite does the trick just fine
I use Leafpad. Its a very simple editor, with minimal features, packaged in the Packman repository (although its also easy to build by oneself): Leafpad web site
I started using Gnome and use like Gedit. Tried KDE after about half a year of using Gnome and didn’t really like the GUI’s. I know other text editors have syntax highlighting as well, which is the main reason I love Gedit, although I only use the R script highlights.
On a GUI fron-end, I use jedit (A java based editor - jEdit - Programmer’s Text Editor - overview) mostly because that is what I use to edit my programs.
In text mode, I just want that good old vi.
I voted vi. That is true when “most used” is the same as “Editor of choice”.
It is more because I use vi already for about 30 years, from the times this was the only one. When you come to the conclusion that this more mental lazyness then active looking for something new and better you are correct.
I voted Kate because that’s what I use for most of my development work (and there’s a nice Groovy/GSP syntax pack for it). However, I’m using it less since the last Netbeans release came out, which also works well with Groovy, but in addition has excellent Grails support, which Kate does not. So I’ll probably be using Kate less. Then it would be KWrite for GUI editing, nano or vim for CLI editing (I try to force myself to use vi, but currently I don’t use any of its real powerful features; I should draw an analogy of sledgehammers and nutshells here…).
Vi for most of my editing. Every now and then I will fire up gedit, but I just love the feel that vi has. It’s just a well designed text editor and I love the modal concept.
