6 ms·

TextEditors.org – A website about every known software Text Editor

fjfaase 3y ago
My personal editor MySample [1] is an extension the Crystal Edit [2] control. Through the years I have improved the colour coding, added navigation through HTML files (for editing my static website), to also make it possible to open images and added a small scripting language, primarily to manipulate images. [1] http://iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html http://iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax-coloring-text-editor https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax...
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
For example of what this site offers, I found the following web page when looking for a .RTF (Rich Text Format) text editor (in my case, specifically for Linux, and ideally open source): https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RichTextEditorFamily https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RichTextEditorFamily (Now that I think about it -- in the future, wouldn't it would be great to have a website/database that would contain all software, not just text editors, but the data would be so granular so as to allow searches on such attributes as open source (or not!), LOC, platform, language, program type, subtype, etc., etc. AlternativeTo has some of this, GitHub has some of this, Wikipedia lists have some of this, and of course, this website has some of this -- but for Text Editors only... anyway, just thinking aloud! <g> :-) <g>)
- teddyh 3y ago
  See also the Debian package tags.
- theendisney2 3y ago
  Imagine something like dht to pump database rows around. If you have an application you put the row at the top before passing it to the next node. You type a search query then wait for the river of spam to float by.
- wild_egg 3y ago
  Great to hear someone other than myself is interested in an all software site. I started working on a site for that in December after getting fed up with the number of times I've looked for a program to do X, not finding it, starting to build it myself, only to stumble across a random HN comment two months later that links to a program that solves the problem better than I ever could. I'd really like a resource that lets me find this stuff better, so I'm making it. Of course, if the usual pattern repeats again — sometime in March I'll come across such a site that has already done this and been running for 5 years and we never knew
  - stonogo 3y ago
    This used to be freshmeat.net, which rebranded to freecode.org and immediately died. It was an heirarchical directory of software, classified by category, user interface, UI toolkit, license, implementation language, operating system support... I often wonder what happened to that database. It would be a great thing to revive. "I want an ncurses text editor that runs on linux and has a permissive license" or "I want a QT-based email client that runs on Windows and is GPL" or "What Mac OS X software is using GTK these days", all extremely quick and easy to look up. edit: http://freshcode.club/ http://freshcode.club/ is basically the freecode version of the site, revived. Unfortunately, one of the changes late in freshmeat's existence was a removal of the formal categorization heirarchy and a transition to arbitrary 'tagging', which led to almost-identical tags, confusingly conflicting tags, and generally made life slightly harder.
    - wild_egg 3y ago
      Thank you for this! I think the information architecture is going to easily be the hardest part of this project. This really gives me some food for thought ... Or I guess I could throw some LLM RAG nonsense on it and see what happens
      - stonogo 3y ago
        The original site (as with sourceforge) was based on "Trove", which I can barely find mention of these days: https://tuxedo.org/esr/trove/ https://tuxedo.org/esr/trove/ the post talking about how it was updated for python 1.5 should be taken as an indication that a new start might be needed!
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
Did Carmack really use Emacs? Hadn’t read that anywhere else.
- 3836293648 3y ago
  He's said so in a Lex Fridman interview
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    I listened to that but I must have missed that. I remember him saying he uses visual studio & visual studio code and that he tried vi but didn't like it.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  I think I heard he used LucidEmacs at around the time of Doom.
eternityforest 3y ago
I want to know what Wim Taymans, Lennart Pottering, and FreeCAD's RealThunder use! There doesn't seem to be many of the big name devs, outside of core low level stuff, talking about editors, unlike guitarists and such who love talking about gear.
chubot 3y ago
Vi and Vim seem a bit under-represented PG uses vi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573802 Roberto Ierusalimschy, creator of Lua, uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/roberto.ierusalimschy/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/roberto.ierusalimschy/ Chris Wellons uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/chris.wellons/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/chris.wellons/ Drew DeVault uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/drew.devault/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/drew.devault/ Derek Sivers uses vim - https://sive.rs/2011-12-usesthis https://sive.rs/2011-12-usesthis Other vim users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848456 https://paulophagula.com/2019/02/15/famous-vim-users.html https://paulophagula.com/2019/02/15/famous-vim-users.html
- gcau 3y ago
  I have never encountered anyone using Vim in any professional environment I've been in.
  - ramon156 3y ago
    Have you been in a professional environment?
  - taskforcegemini 3y ago
    many sysadmins use it professionally
  - ghthor 3y ago
    Infrastructure engineer here, but have worn many hats so far. Started using Vim writing web SPA applications, still using it as my main driver for all writing; which is mostly go, shell and terraform.
zem 3y ago
searched the "family tree" page for aurora [https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Aurora https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Aurora] but sadly it seems to have died without issue
- esafak 3y ago
  I'm glad to meet a fellow Aurora fan but I'm not sure I understand. Aurora died long ago.
  - zem 3y ago
    yeah, I was hoping that the comprehensive family tree would have listed some editors that were "descended" from aurora, in being explicitly inspired by / trying to clone its architecture and user experience.
fluder 3y ago
Where is https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es?
- ehPReth 3y ago
  it is a wiki
nequo 3y ago
Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Rob Pike used[1] sam. Linus Torvalds used a variant of MicroEmacs that is non-extensible and has non-standard keybindings. Bryan Cantrill used Vim without syntax highlighting. What this tells me is that what matters is what you write and whether you finish it, not what you write it in. [1] Past tense because things might have changed.
- robenkleene 3y ago
  My own interpretation here would be most of those programmers wrote a lot of code from scratch, without a ton of library support. When I think of most of the innovations that came later to text editors, I mainly think of features that make it easier to leverage massive amounts of code written by other people in a collaborative environment. E.g., linters, LSP, autocomplete, version control integration. Also, perhaps unintuitively, I'd also put window management in that category which is for me the most important text editor feature. I.e., reading and understanding code written by other programmers spread across many files is the most difficult part of my job, therefore window management is the most important feature. I might even put debugger integration in this category, something I always reach for the debugger for is answering "what is calling this function and with which arguments?" Just about the only feature I can think of that's not in `ed` and that's not most helpful for collaboration and using libraries is syntax highlighting.
  - nequo 3y ago
    Those are fair points. What window management features are the most important to you on your job?
    - robenkleene 3y ago
      I like the way Emacs/Vim handle window management which work the same in the ways that matter to me: - Tabs contain splits (as opposed to splits containing tabs like VS Code). This is important because you can "save your place" with several related places in files and be able to perform a complex subtask in a new tab, and then return to where you were in the original tab - A split can contain any file, or a directory listing (more details in on this http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/01/oil-and-vinegar-split-windows-and-project-drawer/ http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/01/oil-and-vinegar-split-windo...). This makes it easy and intuitive to precisely place a file in a specific split, and it also makes it easy to "jump to definition" within a split without opening a new tab/split, which is disruptive.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
There is a good thread about vi on HN from a few years ago. I think the subject was OpenVi. I compile nvi as a static binary. At 2.1M, that's enough complexity for me in a text editor. I still use ed every day, non-interactively.
timonoko 3y ago
"Kuned" missing. Full name "Kunnallistiedon Editori". From 1973, perhaps. For PDP-11 and CP/M. It mostly solved issues regarding "ÄÖÅ"-characters on anglo-made TTY and video terminals. Most functions were the same as in Wordstar. -- In 1972, 300 municipalities in Finland founded common datacenter named "Kunnallistieto".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
eviks 3y ago
Is there a site with very detailed feature comparison of text editors?

My personal editor MySample [1] is an extension the Crystal Edit [2] control. Through the years I have improved the colour coding, added navigation through HTML files (for editing my static website), to also make it possible to open images and added a small scripting language, primarily to manipulate images. [1] http://iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html http://iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax-coloring-text-editor https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax...

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

For example of what this site offers, I found the following web page when looking for a .RTF (Rich Text Format) text editor (in my case, specifically for Linux, and ideally open source): https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RichTextEditorFamily https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RichTextEditorFamily (Now that I think about it -- in the future, wouldn't it would be great to have a website/database that would contain all software, not just text editors, but the data would be so granular so as to allow searches on such attributes as open source (or not!), LOC, platform, language, program type, subtype, etc., etc. AlternativeTo has some of this, GitHub has some of this, Wikipedia lists have some of this, and of course, this website has some of this -- but for Text Editors only... anyway, just thinking aloud! <g> :-) <g>)

teddyh 3y ago
See also the Debian package tags.
theendisney2 3y ago
Imagine something like dht to pump database rows around. If you have an application you put the row at the top before passing it to the next node. You type a search query then wait for the river of spam to float by.
wild_egg 3y ago
Great to hear someone other than myself is interested in an all software site. I started working on a site for that in December after getting fed up with the number of times I've looked for a program to do X, not finding it, starting to build it myself, only to stumble across a random HN comment two months later that links to a program that solves the problem better than I ever could. I'd really like a resource that lets me find this stuff better, so I'm making it. Of course, if the usual pattern repeats again — sometime in March I'll come across such a site that has already done this and been running for 5 years and we never knew
- stonogo 3y ago
  This used to be freshmeat.net, which rebranded to freecode.org and immediately died. It was an heirarchical directory of software, classified by category, user interface, UI toolkit, license, implementation language, operating system support... I often wonder what happened to that database. It would be a great thing to revive. "I want an ncurses text editor that runs on linux and has a permissive license" or "I want a QT-based email client that runs on Windows and is GPL" or "What Mac OS X software is using GTK these days", all extremely quick and easy to look up. edit: http://freshcode.club/ http://freshcode.club/ is basically the freecode version of the site, revived. Unfortunately, one of the changes late in freshmeat's existence was a removal of the formal categorization heirarchy and a transition to arbitrary 'tagging', which led to almost-identical tags, confusingly conflicting tags, and generally made life slightly harder.
  - wild_egg 3y ago
    Thank you for this! I think the information architecture is going to easily be the hardest part of this project. This really gives me some food for thought ... Or I guess I could throw some LLM RAG nonsense on it and see what happens
    - stonogo 3y ago
      The original site (as with sourceforge) was based on "Trove", which I can barely find mention of these days: https://tuxedo.org/esr/trove/ https://tuxedo.org/esr/trove/ the post talking about how it was updated for python 1.5 should be taken as an indication that a new start might be needed!

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

Did Carmack really use Emacs? Hadn’t read that anywhere else.

3836293648 3y ago
He's said so in a Lex Fridman interview
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  I listened to that but I must have missed that. I remember him saying he uses visual studio & visual studio code and that he tried vi but didn't like it.
NikkiA 3y ago
I think I heard he used LucidEmacs at around the time of Doom.

eternityforest 3y ago

I want to know what Wim Taymans, Lennart Pottering, and FreeCAD's RealThunder use! There doesn't seem to be many of the big name devs, outside of core low level stuff, talking about editors, unlike guitarists and such who love talking about gear.

chubot 3y ago

Vi and Vim seem a bit under-represented PG uses vi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573802 Roberto Ierusalimschy, creator of Lua, uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/roberto.ierusalimschy/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/roberto.ierusalimschy/ Chris Wellons uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/chris.wellons/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/chris.wellons/ Drew DeVault uses vim - https://usesthis.com/interviews/drew.devault/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/drew.devault/ Derek Sivers uses vim - https://sive.rs/2011-12-usesthis https://sive.rs/2011-12-usesthis Other vim users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848456 https://paulophagula.com/2019/02/15/famous-vim-users.html https://paulophagula.com/2019/02/15/famous-vim-users.html

gcau 3y ago
I have never encountered anyone using Vim in any professional environment I've been in.
- ramon156 3y ago
  Have you been in a professional environment?
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  many sysadmins use it professionally
- ghthor 3y ago
  Infrastructure engineer here, but have worn many hats so far. Started using Vim writing web SPA applications, still using it as my main driver for all writing; which is mostly go, shell and terraform.

zem 3y ago

searched the "family tree" page for aurora [https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Aurora https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Aurora] but sadly it seems to have died without issue

esafak 3y ago
I'm glad to meet a fellow Aurora fan but I'm not sure I understand. Aurora died long ago.
- zem 3y ago
  yeah, I was hoping that the comprehensive family tree would have listed some editors that were "descended" from aurora, in being explicitly inspired by / trying to clone its architecture and user experience.

fluder 3y ago

Where is https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es?

ehPReth 3y ago
it is a wiki

nequo 3y ago

Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Rob Pike used[1] sam. Linus Torvalds used a variant of MicroEmacs that is non-extensible and has non-standard keybindings. Bryan Cantrill used Vim without syntax highlighting. What this tells me is that what matters is what you write and whether you finish it, not what you write it in. [1] Past tense because things might have changed.

robenkleene 3y ago
My own interpretation here would be most of those programmers wrote a lot of code from scratch, without a ton of library support. When I think of most of the innovations that came later to text editors, I mainly think of features that make it easier to leverage massive amounts of code written by other people in a collaborative environment. E.g., linters, LSP, autocomplete, version control integration. Also, perhaps unintuitively, I'd also put window management in that category which is for me the most important text editor feature. I.e., reading and understanding code written by other programmers spread across many files is the most difficult part of my job, therefore window management is the most important feature. I might even put debugger integration in this category, something I always reach for the debugger for is answering "what is calling this function and with which arguments?" Just about the only feature I can think of that's not in `ed` and that's not most helpful for collaboration and using libraries is syntax highlighting.
- nequo 3y ago
  Those are fair points. What window management features are the most important to you on your job?
  - robenkleene 3y ago
    I like the way Emacs/Vim handle window management which work the same in the ways that matter to me: - Tabs contain splits (as opposed to splits containing tabs like VS Code). This is important because you can "save your place" with several related places in files and be able to perform a complex subtask in a new tab, and then return to where you were in the original tab - A split can contain any file, or a directory listing (more details in on this http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/01/oil-and-vinegar-split-windows-and-project-drawer/ http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/01/oil-and-vinegar-split-windo...). This makes it easy and intuitive to precisely place a file in a specific split, and it also makes it easy to "jump to definition" within a split without opening a new tab/split, which is disruptive.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

There is a good thread about vi on HN from a few years ago. I think the subject was OpenVi. I compile nvi as a static binary. At 2.1M, that's enough complexity for me in a text editor. I still use ed every day, non-interactively.

timonoko 3y ago

"Kuned" missing. Full name "Kunnallistiedon Editori". From 1973, perhaps. For PDP-11 and CP/M. It mostly solved issues regarding "ÄÖÅ"-characters on anglo-made TTY and video terminals. Most functions were the same as in Wordstar. -- In 1972, 300 municipalities in Finland founded common datacenter named "Kunnallistieto".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

eviks 3y ago

Is there a site with very detailed feature comparison of text editors?