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Lesser Known Terminal Editors
- LeoPanthera 5y ago"!Zap" is not a terminal editor at all, it's a GUI text editor for RISC OS.
- Animats 5y agoTroff is not a terminal editor, either. It's a document markup language, like Tex. It belongs to the family Runoff->nroff->troff->ditroff, and lives on as the horror in which UNIX manual pages are written.
- greenyoda 5y agoI still remember using troff to create typeset output on a C/A/T phototypesetter hooked up to a PDP/11 running Version 7 Unix in the early 1980s. This article has a description of how that phototypesetter worked: https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/index.html https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/index.html
- baruchel 5y agoStill using Troff as my everyday text formatting software. Heirloom Troff works with UTF8 encoding, OTF fonts, Knuth's breaking line algorithm, etc. It does what I want without deciding by itself, has much better support for microtypography then LaTeX, etc.
- danellis 5y agoThat said, it's surprising to see Zap on a list without StrongEd.
- celeritascelery 5y agoSame with Xi, it is a GUI editor.
- mbStavola 5y agoThere are various Xi frontend implementations[1], some of which are entirely terminal based like xi-term[2]. Xi _itself_ does not implement any UI, but there is an example implementation in Xi-Mac[3]. [1]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor#frontends https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor#frontends [2]: https://github.com/xi-frontend/xi-term https://github.com/xi-frontend/xi-term [3]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-mac https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-mac
- donio 5y agoOne of these is not like the others.
- throwawaybutwhy 5y agoNo idea why this is downvoted, maybe it's a Friday thing. Calling troff an editor is unwarranted. XEDIT, mcedit, ISPF's editor could be added to the list.
- rejectedandsad 5y agoAre there any terminal editors that support default tree views? I'm aware of most having them as separate extensions like NERDTree
- teitoklien 5y agoVim does it , with netrw (ships with vim natively) , just press the i key a few times to change netrw’s layout to tree view Just change netrw’s config file to default to the tree view and then add a line in your vim to open netrw by default in a visual split for your project’s root directory.
- peterhil 5y agoI would add Emacs style editors to the list: - zile - mg - qemacs I use zile almost daily for small edits.
- Hemospectrum 5y agoWorth noting, mg has long been included in OpenBSD as the default Emacs-like editor, and now plays the same role in Mac OS. (I’m not sure if Apple distributes the same branch as the one maintained in OpenBSD, though.)
- sys_64738 5y agoWow. I didn't even know this mg existed and see it's installed already on Catalina. I love discovering new stuff like this!
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y agozile is great, it's only major problem being lack of Unicode support
- forgotpwd16 5y agoAlongside the well-known ones, and Zile, another GNU text editor is Moe.
- TylerE 5y agojed is the one I have fond memories of. Back before I could manage vi or emacs, it provided a dead-simple to use editor with "traditional" key bindings (e.g. ctrl-s to save), was often installed by default on random cheap servers, and provided working syntax highlighting out of the box.
- xscott 5y agoJed's author (John E Davis) was also super friendly. Way back when, I was connecting to the university's terminal servers using a dumb terminal. My terminal was unusual in that it had 64 different colors, and this was the kind of thing you couldn't easily get at by fixing your termcap entry. I sent an email to him, and a day or two later, he added capabilities specifically for my terminal. After that, I had very colorful source code for the rest of my schooling. I only stopped using jed after I graduated when I went to work for a Windows (Visual C++) shop.
- CalChris 5y agoTECO should be on that list. But I don't know that there are any modern implementations. It dates to 1962 and was DEC specific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)
- theonemind 5y agohttps://almy.us/teco.html https://almy.us/teco.html i remember playing with this on a Mac in the last few years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dsevil 5y agojoe needs to be on that list. probably. https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
- danellis 5y agoAbsolutely. joe has been my to-go terminal editor for over 20 years.
- lewiscollard 5y agoJoe gang! I also started using it about 20 years ago because, for whatever reason, that was the editor that was there and the editor I heard about, and then I never stopped.
- RJSquirel 5y agoI started using Joe because I had been using... Lordy, Wordstar. For years.
- acheron 5y agoI used to use Joe all the time too. Eventually for work I was working on a lot of systems where I couldn’t easily install it so I moved away from it, but it was a good one.
- xorcist 5y agoNah. This is a list of lesser known editors. Who doesn't love joe?
- isr 5y agoAs someone who quite likes joe (especially its integrated shell - quite appealing to an acme user), may I ask ... Why oh why doesn't it implement proper soft line wrapping???
- trwired 5y agoI'd love to use a terminal editor with Sublime-like keyboard scheme. In fact if Sublime HQ started selling a terminal version of Sublime Text, I'd buy it.
- asivokon 5y agoTake a look at https://github.com/slap-editor/slap https://github.com/slap-editor/slap
- shaicoleman 5y agoLast commit December 2016, needs NodeJS 6.x
- mixmastamyk 5y agoMicro is close, with fewer esoteric features.
- underscore_ku 5y agomicro > nano
- Droobfest 5y agoI really wish micro was the default editor on Linux, nano's hotkeys are completely bonkers.
- schwartzworld 5y agoalias nano="micro"
- NmAmDa 5y agoThis reminds me of last year when I got over with vim and I knew about micro. Since that I lived with " alias vim='micro' " into my zsh config. It is not that famous and cannot be customized a lot like vim but I always hated going between modes.
- boardwaalk 5y agoProbably ought to be called 'terminal-based editors'. Though I suppose you could edit a terminal('s source code) with one of these. </pedantry>
- sea6ear 5y agoI had a brief flirtation with THE (The Hessling Editor) when I was in college. It was programmable in Rexx. I found it fascinating but ultimately moved on to Vim and Emacs as my daily drivers.
- BobLangill 5y agoI've been using THE (The Hessling Editor) steadily since 2012 for work and for personal projects. Its ability to incorporate Rexx makes it easy to customize the editor as well as facilitate use with other useful programs such as Freeplane, or launch and track Microsoft Office work. Vim and Emacs are part of standard toolsets in a wider base of organizations, so if you've bounced around, they would be more useful. Also, THE doesn't handle unicode very well, so that presents a decreasing window for application as unicode becomes more wide spread. Meanwhile, The Hessling Editor, continues to be downloaded from SourceForge and has active forums.
- znpy 5y agoI'm surprised I couldn't find mg on the list. It's like a micro-version of emacs. Imagine an editor just to fit your muscular memory, but without all the elisp and stuff. Just for those quick edits.
- stonefish 5y agoGentoo linux has a list of packages that it deems to be acceptable terminal editors. https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/virtual/editor/editor-0-r3.ebuild https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/virtual/edito...
- fouc 5y agoI've always wondered if there was an editor like QEDIT on MSDOS, but remade for linux. qedit was miles better than nano.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoMicro is the new hotness.
- drran 5y agoTurbo - editor made using TurboVision, with support for Unicode: https://github.com/magiblot/turbo https://github.com/magiblot/turbo
- qbasic_forever 5y agoIt's sad no one really uses block characters anymore in text UIs. :(
- drran 5y agofinalcut (modern C++ library for TUI with good support for mouse) uses block characters in TUI. [0]: https://github.com/gansm/finalcut https://github.com/gansm/finalcut
- tankfeeder 5y agodte
- erk__ 5y agoThere is also ee/aee/xee which is by default installed on FreeBSD as a alternative to vi which does not have mode switching.
- rascul 5y agoI used setedit some few decades ago. http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ http://setedit.sourceforge.net/
- forgotpwd16 5y agoA similar list is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors#Text_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors#Text_user...
- PAPPPmAc 5y agoI've been really taken with Micro for a couple years. I have the classic GUI-style control key combinations (^Z,X,C,V,F, etc.) so deeply in my fingers that I inevitably try to use them everywhere, appropriate or not, and Micro does the right thing with them. Super intuitive (Ctrl+Arrows to jump words) and/or mnemonic (Ctrl+T for Tab) for the usual text-editor features. A good selection of power feature like Sublime-ish multiple cursors and a scriptable command line. Mouse integration just works in X. Hooks xclip or xsel to integrate with the system clipboard. Etc. And (being written in go), it's super easy to make static binaries and/or cross-compile to drop on machines which are fucked or you have limited access to or the like. Eg. if you need an editor on some random embedded ARM Linux box, you can'env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm CGO_ENABLED=0 make' and a few seconds later you have a binary to drop there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 5y agoI waited for micro for twenty years. Hobbled with nano+config files, then ne, tolerable but not great. If it only had a menu like turbovision, I’d absolutely love it.
- smoldesu 5y agoMicro is awesome! My only gripe is that the default color scheme doesn't respect your terminal's settings, but that is quickly remedied with `set colorscheme simple` (cmc-16 also works).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mftrhu 5y ago> troff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff ... why is troff on a list of terminal editors? It can format text for the terminal, sure - and it's quite versatile, as I discovered playing around with it - but it's as much of an editor as LaTeX or markdown. That said, if I used to find new editors fascinating - http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl - these days I just can't imagine leaving Emacs and my own customizations behind.
- Bluecobra 5y agoWhy the heck is ed on the list? It’s probably included in every *nix distro ever made. After all it is THE standard editor. :)
- kps 5y agoThere are actually Linux distributions that don't include it (e.g. Debian), even though it's required by POSIX.
- callinyouin 5y agoI was just wondering the same thing. Like, I get that ed isn't exactly a household name when it comes to software generally, but in the very specific world of terminal emulators it's practically royalty.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]