Text editors


elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu
Here's my personal page on text editors for linux, and a brief description of the better ones.

Contents

ee

ee stands for "easy editor" ee is a very easy to use editor which always displays the keybindings on line so that you don't have to know anything to use it. It is good for people who don't want to learn how to use a text editor.

Emacs

Emacs is a popular text editor. it has several features including extensibility, customisability, and several powerful features file comparison, spell checking, syntax hilighting which is good but not as good as that on vim, an IDE, mail and news reading ... calling emacs an editor is a little misleading. Compared to vim , it seems fast for editing small regions of text but slower for editing large files , as the vim commands are more compact, and in some cases more powerful. The nice use of emacs-style keybindings is for interactive shells: the default line editor in bash resembles emacs.

Jed

Jed is a versatile editor that can "impersonate" a number of well known text editors includiong emacs. For people looking for a wordstar clone or a lightweight version of emacs, jed is nice.

Joe

Joe is a lot like jed: it is a lightwieght editor that includes different modes including pico, wordstar and emacs.

mcedit

mcedit is the editor that ships with midnight commander. It is very dos like, it looks and feels a lot like dos edit. Good for nostalgic windows refugees.

Nedit

Nedit is a GUI editor which should make windows users feel at home. It has some programmer-friendly features, and is essentially a superset of the classic windows text editors (notepad) in functionality.

Pico

Pico ships with the popular email client pine pico is much like ee in a number of ways. It is not terribly powerful (in fact quite the opposite) but easy to use. Good for people who don't want to know how to use a text editor.