(Modified 2009 Feb 16)

There were a few key features I was looking for in a text editor:

• ease of installation/use
• small size
• ability to have multiple files open, be it via tabs or a split window

Ultimately, I settled on two: nedit and vi. For comparison, my favorite two Windows text editors are Notetab Light and OxEdit.

vi/vim/gvim

vi probably needs no introduction. I was interested in the enhanced version, vim, which has mouse support and split windows and context-sensitive coloring. There's a graphical version too, gvim, that has pulldown menus, which ought to be useful to people who can't remember the control characters.

Mouse control is off by default, so to turn it on, have this in your ~/.vimrc file:

set mouse=a

vi is notoriously user-unfriendly, so I've been working on a cheatsheet.

Some other editors that I use:

• nedit now has tabs, and has the rare ability to select columns. I've been using it more and more.
• gedit is somewhat big, but often the GNOME libraries are already running.
• emacs is good, but overkill, with all sorts of features I'll never use.
• kate is full-featured but is very big, using the KDE libraries
• geany has tabs, but the drag behavior is weird, copying text rather than moving it.

tea

tea is probably obscure, by some guy in the Ukraine. It is small, supports tabs, depends only on the GTK, is highly customizable, can display line numbers, and even has HTML markup capabilities. I'm not too keen on how the search field works though. Also, it would be nice to have a warning when you close without saving. My tea_rc file looks like:

#TEA editor configuration file. Please read the manual
editor_font=Courier 10 Pitch 13
how_line_nums=1
tab_size=8

Below are the text editors I experimented with and was dissatisfied, either because I didn't like them or couldn't install them at various times. Keep in mind I may have given up quickly on the ones that didn't install right away, i.e., laziness prevailed.

• codeeditor -- couldn't compile
• mp -- froze when I tried it
• aee -- poor man's vi
• axe -- like xedit, but more annoying
• eddi -- dependency problem
• eedit -- dependency problem
• glimmer -- dependency problem
• adie -- no tabs
• xcoral -- no tabs
• setedit -- dependency problem
• wyoeditor -- dependency problem

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