[buug] Recommend an editor?

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Mon Nov 11 11:23:22 PST 2002


Quoting Skip Evans (evans at ncseweb.org):

> Can anyone recommend a nice, easy to use editor for office
> types that won't cause me to find them laying down out in traffic?
> 
> I've got ee here, and was thinking of that. Any other ideas?

You didn't specify whether they'll be in an X11 environment or not.
Obviously, you would get a rather different set of answers, depending.
Please try to be specific.

Making the assumption that we're talking console-only:

e3 is another nice little editor you might use.  Depending on the name
you call it by, it supports the keybindings of emacs, vi, pico, nedit,
or WordStar.  The binary is only 10 kB, with no library dependencies.

"ne" (Nice Editor) is rather similar -- ncurses-based with menus.

But on the whole, you'll indeed probably want to steer them towards "ee"
(easy editor):  It has an always-displayed information/help window at
the top, and pop-up menus.  It's also modeless, using control keys for
commands.

When they get tired of being babied by ee, they can graduate to "joe"
(Joe's Own Editor), which modelled after the editor in Borland Turbo C
and WordStar.  It has a fairly impressive feature set, including
multiple windows and a regex engine, and supports keybindings of pico,
emacs, and WordStar, among others.

And speaking of pico, don't install it, but rather GNU nano, which is
significantly better (e.g., a proper search-and-replace, smaller,
faster, less buggy) and a fully compatible superset, along with avoiding
UofW's proprietary licence.  "pico" should be present only as a symlink.

Tell Genie Scott that this one's free.  ;->  (I've done network
consulting for NCSE, a bit over a decade back.)

-- 
Cheers,                    Long ago, there lived a creature with a 
Rick Moen                  voice like a vacuum cleaner.  We know little
rick at linuxmafia.com        about it, but we do know that it ate cats.



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