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What is your daily GOTO text editor?
| 6% | 15 votes |
| 34% | 75 votes |
| 16% | 35 votes |
| 7% | 16 votes |
| 6% | 15 votes |
| 7% | 17 votes |
| 0% | 1 votes |
| 19% | 43 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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What is your daily GOTO text editor?
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If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday June 02, @03:14AM
I use a Mac, you insensitive clods! When I'm in the GUI that's what I use. When I'm in the Terminal doing command-line stuff I'm using vim but that doesn't happen very often.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02, @04:28AM (2 children)
Gotta love the WordStar keystroke muscle memory. Thanks Joe [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by crb3 on Sunday June 09, @12:51PM (1 child)
Yep, that mode of joe is jstar and I use it constantly.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday June 11, @12:41AM
I don't remember ever using WordStar, might have tried it somewhere along the line long ago. But I've been using joe for, well, more than 25 years and it's a must-have on Linux.
Also like KDE Kate in GUI mode. (You don't need to install all of KDE to run KDE apps like Kate).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimios on Sunday June 02, @12:07PM (2 children)
On the terminal I use Joe's Own Editor (joe)
The sysadmin guru I learned from used it around 2000-2005 so I learned it too.
It has Wordstar shortcuts, so usually Ctrl+k followed by a letter.
I'm not dead if I have to use vim but I prefer joe or mcedit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 02, @01:54PM
Back around 2012 I had some favorite editor like joe, but I hop from one system to the next too much to mess around with installing an editor every time I need one.
I like gedit but I dislike GNOME. Mousepad is good, but both of them require an X desktop running.
nano is always there always ready to go. It's shamefully primitive, but Ctrl K cuts and Ctrl U uncuts can do a lot.
Getting to be 33 years since I used Brief (by Underware) on DOS as a daily driver, for several years. It had windowing, which is nice, column copy paste, which is awesome, and was relatively simple to learn, unlike some OS in an editor alternatives that were established and growing around the same time. I would really like to see a text editor as good as Brief replace nano as the CLI standard editor in basic Debian system images.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Sunday June 02, @02:13PM
Since a few decades I am preferring Joe's Own Editor (joe) as well. If that one is missing on a system, I am also able to find my way around in nano, pico or vi/vim.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 02, @12:36PM (2 children)
At one particular place I use Windows Notepad on Windows 11, because I don't want to scare anybody by changing anything.
A text editor should not be rocket science, but it is so insanely broken.
For a while last year whenever I used "undo" it would often delete the text I had pasted over rather than restoring the text, causing me to lose data I was working on. It started working again after some update, but kind of fucking bug should NEVER get anywhere near a production environment.
Then there is some keyboard button that if I accidentally mash it, suddenly all the text aligns to the right side of the screen instead of the normal left. I assume that "feature" is for some non-English version of Windows, but that leaves everyone else on the planet scratching their head as to what the fuck just happened and how to undo it.
It constantly loses my place in files. If I use "find" to locate text, it usually snaps back to where I was previously when I close the Find box, which is NEVER what I want. If I open another file in a new tab, my other tabs jump up to the top of the file.
Then, out of nowhere, they suddenly add a spell checker. Not an awful feature, but not something that should be added to a production release.
At least it is still the one place where I can copy and past text from other applications without having everything turn in to a mess of different sized and colored fonts. I can't even remember the last time I wanted to copy text with "formatting".
Then there is Microsoft Office 360 - what kind of fucking retard thinks it is a good idea to RENT a word processor?! I have to log in with a Microsoft Ball-And-Chain account just to use it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I hate this planet.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Thursday June 13, @02:22PM (1 child)
Notepad has gotten actively worse over the years. Back in the anals of Microsoft's history, Notepad used to display the current line and column. They got rid of that. Presumably because it made notepad too useful (especially when writing/debugging code) compared to their premium products.
>> Not an awful feature, but not something that should be added to a production release.
This seems to be the highest standard that Microsoft operate at. Most other changes they make are worse.
>> I can't even remember the last time I wanted to copy text with "formatting".
This. totally.
>> I hate this planet.
No, this planet also contains Linux. You need to instead hate the actual cause of your pain. Microsoft.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 14, @06:20AM
I believe the word you are looking for is "annals" since that is where they record what Microsoft already pulled that version of Notepad out of their "anals."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday June 02, @01:33PM
I use geany for almost all my editing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 02, @03:10PM
gedit and nano...depends.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday June 02, @04:34PM (1 child)
I never code using goto. I had enough of that to last a lifetime in the 8-bit micro days.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday June 03, @02:10PM
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOSUB 20
30 RETURN
40 END
The stack will unwind and program will end when it reaches the RETURN statement.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday June 02, @04:42PM (2 children)
When I was young I used to hate vi. I thought it was insane. Then I ended up working with very clever people who LART'd me. "Here's a nickel, sonny, buy yourself a real computer."
The learning curve is horrendous but even after a couple of hours you start to become much more productive. You then begin to wonder why people put up with all those other editors out there. Don't get me started on the likes of Eclipse or VSCode.
Funnily enough, I'm not what you'd call a vi or vim expert. I learned just enough to suit my own workflow. What I then found myself doing was automating several tasks. Do I use macros? No, I use shell scripts and sed and very occasionally a little bit of awk. At some point you have to nail your colours to a particular mast and get on with it, however, I try to avoid getting locked into particular applications. So rather than write macros for a particular editor, I use the shell.
I think the most lines of working code I've ever written in a day (by hand) was about two thousand, when I was at the top of my game some years ago. I've since developed all sorts of little ad-hoc tools for helping me write code. Some are burned into my brain and I can sit down at a keyboard and start hacking out scripts to help me write code so I can go from zero to several hundred lines in less than a day.
Of course, I should be using higher-level languages that require fewer lines of code but that's another story.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 06, @04:32PM (1 child)
The most productive day I ever had consisted of a code review where four of us spent less than 45 minutes going through about 200 lines of code identified by a profiling tool as the significant bottleneck.
In that brief code review we identified a potential speedup: reducing those 200 lines of code to about 195 that also reduced cache misses and accelerated performance by ~100x. This was unexpected and meant that the massive arrays of 50+ high performance computers per site the company was planning for could be served by a single machine performing the task over twice as fast as needed.
I, too, have had 2000+ LOC days, but looking back at code cranked out like that has never made me proud.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06, @11:15PM
It can depend on the code. The most code I've ever cranked out in a day was almost 5000. That code model was impeccable, I was on my game, and newly refreshed after a vacation. It was an absolute breeze to write the code, instantiate the test templates, crosscheck against the specification, and then verify. That is the only reason I was able to crank it out in a day and it was a beautifully great day I'll probably never match. Another great day was when I moved a server from Go to Erlang while cutting server requirements by 80%. On the other side of that, I've had multiple days were I've written maybe a dozen lines of code that perfectly fit the specification that verified first try. To the reverse that, I have had days where I've torn out my hair trying to get simple five line functions to do what I want them to do in an acceptable manner and days where I've done hundreds of lines but those lines were complete shit that I wasn't happy with and ended up jettisoning eventually.
More than the code lines, it really more settles on your psychological flow and how useful the final product is. That's really what the three of us had on our special days. But it is also easy to mistake the SLOCs as the reason rather than the result.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Sunday June 02, @07:36PM (2 children)
Neovim. I guess that counts as Vim.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday June 11, @01:54AM (1 child)
Of course it does, it's nearly the same thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13, @02:19PM
...neorly the same thing.
FTFY.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ese002 on Sunday June 02, @11:12PM
Still based on Motif, it is need of an update but it works fine. It has extensible syntax highlighting, excellent column support, and a vastly more intuitive interface than emacs and vi. I suppose I should hunt down something newer with all these features that is better supported and likely to stay that way will into the future but Nedit stlll works and my not sure that anything outside of the emacs and vi really has long term viability.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday June 03, @07:15AM (2 children)
I just sorta like it. Although I paid (OMG!) for a license on and now I can't figure out how to transfer it around to my other work stations, so I get a license nag every hour or so...
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday June 03, @07:19AM
That was supposed to read "on [some box]" but SN ate my angle brackets :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 04, @08:33AM
You can have them send you a new one: https://www.sublimetext.com/retrieve_key [sublimetext.com] and transfer it around: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/portable_license_keys.html [sublimetext.com]
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday June 03, @09:09AM (2 children)
For terminal work, which is frequent, I usually use nano. I can use vim but I find it more cumbersome and less natural.
For grocery lists, simple jot-down stuff, etc, I don't use a notes application, I use mousepad, Xfce's text editor. It's small, minimalistic, Gtk+ based, and has good clipboard integration.
For code, I use Geany [geany.org]. Truly an excellent mini-IDE, using Gtk+3 and C/C++. Has efficient autocomplete, support for tons of languages, and very easy to make your own colorschemes. I've used Geany for nearly every bit of code I've ever written, since I was 15. I love Geany.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday June 04, @03:41AM (1 child)
I'm trying to figure out what the difference is between Mousepad and Xed, both of which apparently came with my Mint XFCE install. The menus look practically identical?
Or is there some weird technical reason like one of them is built using Gtk and the other uses Qt or something
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 04, @06:23AM
Completely different lineages. Mousepad is officially a part of the XFCE project and is an almost complete rewrite of the original Mousepad, which was a fork to add printer support to Leafpad, which was an original project back in the early 2000s. Xed is the official text editor for Linux Mint and is a fork of Pluma, which is the official text editor of the MATE desktop, which forked it from gedit when they forked the entire GNOME project, and gedit was created by the GNOME team back in the late 1990s. The resemblance is only superficial and probably comes from both using GTK, both supporting the system theme, and both being based in the sort of base idea of what a turn of the century text editor should look like .
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormreaver on Monday June 03, @11:37AM
If I'm working in a terminal, it's nano. If it's on the desktop, it's kate or kwrite.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Monday June 03, @01:21PM (1 child)
I prefer to use ee (Easy Editor) because I am an OpenBSD user.
Years ago, I used to use Emacs - but you need to spend about 3 weeks configuring it to work the way it did on the machine in the lab next door, and the same thing next month.
It is true that I use Vi (or some close imitation) when I need more processing power, and Nano if using Ubuntu (or McPiberry or whatever).
In reality, the editor you get to use is not necessarily your choice. If the machine fails to complete the boot process, you use what you have available to fix it.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 03, @06:24PM
Emacs and other windows apps can be run off a flash drive [portableapps.com], or at least the config files can be stored on one, or on a central Samba share. Configuring it (or other applications that benefit from customization) on every machine is a huge drag when you're trying to get real work done, no doubt.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snospar on Monday June 03, @02:08PM
Notepad++ at work and Geany at home
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday June 03, @05:52PM (3 children)
Notepad++ for the win. I use windows at work as essentially my choices are Microsoft or Apple. Notepad++ has some very useful things like column selection, macros, and it keeps your unsaved tabs "temporarily forever" until you choose to save them or close them.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 03, @07:12PM (2 children)
I have coworkers who use Notepad++ on production server machines. (Windows, obviously) I would never install a program on a production machine that "phones home" as Notepad++ can do for updates.
Even very much more worser, they also have no problems installing Chrome on a server. I would never do that unless I had no choice -- and even for some special purpose, then I would uninstall it when finished with it. There is little to no good reason to use a browser on a server. There are other safer methods to transfer files to/from a server.
What editor do I use? SciTE. It is small. Doesn't phone home. Superior to Notepad in every way, and on a par with Notepad++. I've used it for many years, so I trust it. I don't upgrade it very often, and when I do I can use it for a long time in a non-production context before upgrading it on a production server. It's just an editor. Doesn't need many upgrades.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 04, @06:46AM
Chrome on a server boggles my mind. I can't understand a security policy that allows that in any way. I have a hard enough time with the idea of a server phoning home to a third-party due to any software. By comparison, I've worked for places where servers can't make any new outbound connections at all and any attempt to do so immediately fences the node as a serious indication of compromise. While I am sometimes surprised to hear about the data breaches and security policies at other places, I'm thankful most of my career has been where they take security much more seriously. It's nice to have a security process that works because it is better for everyone involved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, @02:14AM
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday June 03, @09:42PM (1 child)
Another vote for NotePad++. I'm only a lonely Windows admin, though I do use nano for a couple of tasks.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 4, Touché) by cmdrklarg on Monday June 03, @09:43PM
That should be "lowly", but "lonely" is true too. Cheers!
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday June 04, @12:52AM
It comes with Mastercam, and has features specifically for editing gcode.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 04, @12:44PM
I usually use nvi or vim for quick jobs (depending on what ships with the OS on the box), but my favorite editor is vis because multiple cursors are hard to live without once you get used to them and structural regex is so nice (kakoune just rubs me the wrong way though, I can't get used to it).
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday June 04, @03:57PM (4 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday June 04, @08:32PM (3 children)
One might argue you need to refactor your code.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, @02:16AM (2 children)
Job security FTW! 😉
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday June 05, @07:00AM
No, so that it's easier to understand and to maintain, and so that each function can be unit tested.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, @08:11AM
Just use a language other than old versions of old languages like C or FORTRAN and you can have identifiers that actually identify instead of having to guarantee uniqueness of short names. Much easier to read a stack of properly named functions called on properly named arguments than having to keep the entire state of the nested inlined basic blocks in mind.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ingar on Tuesday June 04, @09:15PM (1 child)
If you miss Notepad++ on Linux.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 1) by HeadlineEditor on Saturday June 08, @08:24AM
Thank you for this. Yes I do miss Notepad++ on Linux. I've been using Sublime but of course nag screen. Trying notepadqq now.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday June 05, @11:39AM
you can, at least with past and current distros, be certain that a bare bones basic *NIX/BSD/GNU Linux installation will have it so it is worth knowing how to use. If for nothing else than adding the repositories needed to install your editor of choice.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06, @09:17AM
N/T
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday June 08, @02:59AM
For text, and for C code, I use emacs.
For compuer programs that I mostly write in Scheme, I use Drracket.
(Score: 2) by BlueCoffee on Sunday June 09, @03:44AM (1 child)
On a Mac/Linux terminal, nano.
On Windows, Notepad++
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Tuesday June 11, @07:45PM
When I was on the Mac, I used to love BBEdit. It is hands down the best GUI text editor. There's nothing that comes close on Linux (my present OS).
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday June 10, @04:04AM (1 child)
The biggest difficulty I have with vim is that it's difficult to enter special characters, like the degree sign or Greek characters. When I need to do that, I have to open Libre Office, Insert Special Character, then copy-paste it into vim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10, @04:54AM
Vim is not that difficult to insert special characters at all. You can use the digraphs system [sourceforge.net], combining characters [sourceforge.net], or do it by value [sourceforge.net]. If it gets to the point that you have to open the document in a completely different editor, you might as well just look up the value in the index to the code charts and insert it by value in vim.
(Score: 2) by GlennC on Monday June 10, @12:02PM (1 child)
Isn't that what "Programming Experts" have been preaching for decades?
;)
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10, @10:31PM
Only those that completely misinterpreted Dykstra's letter to the ACM.