What does your favorite text editor say about you?

Remember this post? I’m doing it again. I once said that your choice of a web browser reveals something about your personality. Same can be said about the choice of your preferred text editor. Tell me what is the default editor on your system, and I will tell you what kind of person you are.

Vim Logo

Vim or Vi

You are a minimalist at heart, but you value raw power of a sophisticated, and yet simple editor. You hate to waste key strokes. You laugh derisively at the fools fighting with their silly Notepad like editors. You either use a traditional unix keyboard or you switched around Ctrl and Caps Lock so that they are in their popper places. Chances are that you might be (or have been) a sysadmin. You think that Emacs is not a text editor, but a fucking operating system with a built in kitchen sink, and a circus tent. You might as well use an IDE.

Emacs

Emacs

Your choice of text editor was simple. You wanted the most powerful, and most extensible editor on Earth. And you can write a formal mathematical proof that Emacs is that editor. You are a lisp hacker and you are not afraid to use it. In fact, when you watched Matrix you were disappointed that the streaming code on the screens was not lisp. You still think that the back-end and AI of the Matrix is done in that language. You might have (or are working towards) a PHD.

Pico or Nano

As everyone knows, Pico is an acronym which stands for “I can’t figure out vi and Emacs is crazy”. You do try to be as hard-core as your Vi and Emac’s friends but you just can’t deal with their funky editors. You are ok trading off all their power for familiar simplicity because you don’t need advanced features. All you need is a working text editor. And Pico/Nano is just that. No frills, no bells, no whistles. Just rock solid functionality. You think that people who put time and effort into “mastering” a text editor have way to much time on their hands. It is very likely that you are using Pine for your email. Pine of course stands for “can’t figure out Mutt”.

Notepad

Notepad

It actually never occurred to you to try a different text editor. Notepad was always there, and you never needed more. All the extra features in the other editors are just making them slower and harder to use. Notepad does what it was designed to do, and doesn’t get in your way.

Gedit

Gedit

You are a bit like the Notepad user, but you use Ubuntu or Fedora instead of Windows. Gedit is the default, and that’s what you use. It is completely sufficient for editing small config files, and you never really needed stuff like syntax highlighting. It never occurred to you that you could use anything else. The KDE practice of starting names of all their applications with k annoys you.

Word

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is not a text editor. You should not be allowed near a computer. In fact you are the cancer that is killing the internet. Kill yourself.

Kate

Kate

You are a hard code KDE user. Kate is not only a robust editor with syntax highlighting – it is also a fully functional KDE component. This means that you can use it to edit files on remote servers in place by simply using the fish:// or sftp:// protocol in the file dialog. Because of this you wouldn’t change this editor for any other. In fact, almost every single application that you use on daily basis starts with a K: kontact, kmail, koffice, kopete, kdevelop, konqueror, konsole and etc.. You try to use as few non KDE apps as possible. GTK applications piss you off because they clash with your interface, use counter-intuitive file dialogs, and look awkward and unpolished.

Ed

Ed is the standard text editor. Enough said. You are in fact, too fucking awesome for this article. You have yet to meet a person who would be worth your respect. Every person you ever worked with was a fucking clueless n00b. You are a BOFH and proud of it. On the systems you administrate you symlink vi, emacs and nano to ed just to watch the lusers squirm in their seats and hit Ctrl+C repeatedly. You are likely to have a big bushy beard, and are probably wearing a T-shirt with a cryptic joke that only people with unix background will understand.

Notepad2 or Notepad++

Notepad2, Notepad++ and etc..

You like the simplicity of Notepad, but you wanted a bit more. Not to much – just some syntax highlighting and maybe having line numbers displayed on the margin. You do use the editor to write some code, but you like to keep it simple. You are not a Linux user so you have no clue what that whole Emacs vs Vi thing is all about. You also hate IDE’s – they are bloated and get in the way of doing your work. Simplicity is your mantra.

TextMate

TextMate

You tried many different text editors. You could never get a hang of vi and Emacs. You think it’s a bit crazy to spend time and effort learning how to use them. You were dissatisfied with every single editor on the market. They were either to difficult to use, to simplistic, or too bloated. Then you found TextMate and it felt like an extension of your body. It did for text editing what OSX did for operating systems. You love this editor so much, that you actually don’t mind it’s not free. For you it’s worth every penny. You don’t mind being the only guy in your town who actually paid for a text editir. You are a smug Mac user, and proud of it. You have recurring fantasies in which you strangle Justin Long with you Mighty Mouse cord.

Cream

You love vim but you can’t deal with it’s sharp learning curve, and funky key bindings. So you took the easy way out, and got the best of both worlds – the power of Vim, and standard key bindings for the most common functions. When hanging out with your Vim buddies you usually forget to tell them about this and act as if you were using the real thing. Because in essence you are. Your version just has the added key bindings. You would be embarrassed if anyone found out abut it though.

SciTe

Your text editor is lightweight, full featured, extensible and cross platform. In addition, it can work as a stand-alone executable which requires no installation. Fits perfectly with all your other portable tools on your USB thumb drive. You also love how SciTE let’s you write Lua scripts to extend it’s functionality. You take your text editor choice very seriously. You like tinkering, and minimalistic, portable applications.

TextPad

TextPad or EditPlus

You use your editor for programming. What you want is something like a mini IDE with the ability to launch compilers from within the editor, and capture their output, but without the bloat. You value simplicity. Scite was to funky to you, and choices like Notepad2 were bit too basic. Your current editor has everything that you can need, and you probably won’t ever need more. You suffer from a common affliction known as IDE phobia. Whenever you want to make yourself puke all you have to do is to just imagine working in Visual Studio and/or Eclipse. You think that all the Vi and Emacs people are even more crazy than the poor misguided souls who use IDE’s.

Joe

Jey, 1987 called and they want their Word Star key bindings back!

Edit

Edit

You are one of the last representatives of the dying breed of MS DOS enthusiasts. You are master at batch scripting, and you wrote dozens of scripts, and small applications to streamline your work on Windows. You are one of the last few people who knows how to squeeze out every bit of functionality out of cmd.exe. You are to windows what a hard-core vi/ed user is to unix. You know almost all there is to know about windows, and all your systems run blazing fast and efficiently. You strip all your windows installations down to their bare bones, move around important files, and optimize everything. You think that Windows 2000 was the best OS that came out from Microsoft. You run a mix of win NT, win95-98 and win2k boxes at home but you don’t own Windows XP. Vista scares you. It signifies an end of an era and a sad victory of bloat and eye candy over simplicity and functionality.

Q10

You are one of those smug assholes who thinks it is hip, cool and retro to use a full screen editor. “Uh, oh! I’m a big time writer. I can’t be distracted by a taskbar and a clock when I write.” Give me a break. You probably also use words like blogosphere and blogerati and consider yourself a journalist. Sigh…

That’s all I have for now. Feel free to “remind me” about your favorite editor that I omitted in the comments. Also please note that this is all good natured humor. So feel free to complain that judging people by their text editor is stupid, shallow and etc. But that just means you are not getting it and you will be laughed at.

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129 Responses to What does your favorite text editor say about you?

  1. Ricardo INDIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    lol!! You know, I discovered your blog from a link on another blog mentioning your post about the web browsers…

    I have to admit, though, that I use Word sometimes… (A door opens… What? ah!!! no!! Please! stop! don’t kill me!!! aaaaaaaaaaaaa….)

    Ok, it’s rare but I use it. Most of the time I use netbeans, Delphi Editor, or Notepad2.

    You didn’t mention OpenOffice or StarOffice…

    Reply  |  Quote
  2. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I didn’t mention them because they are not text editors. They are WYSIWIG word processing suites that are perfectly acceptable for writing essays, reports and letters to your grandma.

    The word comment was aimed at people who can’t tell the difference. For example, if I ask them what is their default text editor, they say Word, when in fact they should probably say notepad or something like that.

    The worst are the people who insist using word for everything – for example write code or HTML in it because they just don’t know any better. I swear, I once knew a guy who wrote his Java homework assignment in Word, saved it as .doc and then could not figure out why it would not compile.

    In addition people who think that using Word’s “Save as Web Page” feature can be considered “web design” also need to die.

    In general though, I don’t think that using Word where appropriate is something that should be condemned.

    Reply  |  Quote
  3. Ricardo INDIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    At least the ones using StarOffice or OpenOffice deserve the credit for being Linux users…

    But you are 110% right: Word for code, HTML pages, image editing, etc… is just plain stupid!

    Reply  |  Quote
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  5. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    [quote comment=”5651″]At least the ones using StarOffice or OpenOffice deserve the credit for being Linux users…[/quote]

    Not necessarily. Some Open Office users are Windows people. :)

    Reply  |  Quote
  6. BvTaa GERMANY Mozilla Linux says:

    You missed the one I use (and of course consider the best): JEDIT. :)

    Reply  |  Quote
  7. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Oh shit! Totally forgot Jedit!

    There is going to be like 67 posts here with editors that I know about, but couldn’t remember at the time I wrote this. LOL

    Reply  |  Quote
  8. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    For some reason, my users like to use nedit. As for myself, I am a typical UNIX sysadmin and will only use vi. At one time I used to use emacs, but being a sysadmin converted me since vi comes with all UNIX/Linux ditros (I know, ed does as well . . . ).

    Of course, all editor wars turn out something like this: LINKY

    Reply  |  Quote
  9. Dax UNITED STATES Opera Windows says:

    Bah. BvTaa beat me to it. Anyways, when in school, I was a Pico/Nano guy. Once I needed more versatility in my editor, I made the jump to jEdit and Vim. If I need something to make a quick open and close edit, I typically use Vim. If I’m doing something bigger, like a LaTeX document for example, I’ll use jEdit. I’ll actually use jEdit’s HyperSearch to find files or text in files versus Windows build-in file finder. I find it way more powerful and much faster at accomplishing its task.

    Reply  |  Quote
  10. Massimiliano ITALY Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Mousepad, the XFCE default text editor!!!
    (Just kidding, after all it does nothing more than Gedit :-)

    Anyway, I’m not a developer (except some web stuff), so my editor of choice doesn’t have to be so powerful. When I simply need to organize some ideas I got I prefer a wiki kind of editor. My favourite is zim, simply beautiful.

    I saved this page on my HD, because I fear it will be under digg-effect in the next hours… ;-)

    Reply  |  Quote
  11. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Best line evar: I edited inodes by had with magnets! LOLOL!

    Reply  |  Quote
  12. Jake UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Linux says:

    I have slowly stopped using Emacs in favor of Kate. I love editing my web pages without having to go to Konqueror to FTP and such… in fact, I never use FTP clients anymore. Sarcasm or not, GNOME/GTK+ does have weird file save dialogs and looks ugly. Luckily KDE at least allows me to apply its interface to GTK+ apps to some degree.

    Reply  |  Quote
  13. Daniel Lucraft UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    gedit really does have syntax highlighting.

    Reply  |  Quote
  14. mind UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    haha. at least joe made the list!! it was the only text editor that i remembered the name of when i installed linux the first time, and i’ve stuck with it since.

    Reply  |  Quote
  15. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Jake – this is precisely one of the reasons why I like KDE so much. :)

    [quote comment=”5664″]gedit really does have syntax highlighting.[/quote]

    Oops, I guess it just shows that I haven’t used Gnome in a while. Last time I used it (on a 3-4 year old machine) it didn’t really highlight anything so I assumed it didn’t have any.

    Reply  |  Quote
  16. Phrodo_00 CHILE Epiphany Linux says:

    I use vim for everything but programming, it just doesn’t feel right for me yet, I have to find some time to configure it and make it more confortable, so I’m using anjuta for that, that’s an ide but everything I use from it is the editor and the compile key, so I’m kind of looking for “the editor”, I actually started used anjuta because the semester just started and I need to code my ass off.
    Oh!, and gedit is quite more than what you people are saying, it not only has syntax highlighting, it has… themed syntax highlighting! (don’t search it in your ubuntu, the theme part will come with gnome 2.20)… now seriously, it’s a pretty featured editor, and the plugins can do a lot more, there’s code snippets (template like things that I’d love to have in anjuta or vim), a python object explorer, terminal, file browser, and a lot more.

    Reply  |  Quote
  17. Russ UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    As I just recently exclaimed my love for GEdit, I feel the need to come over and defend it here… one word: Plugins!

    It’s a great text editor that has syntax highlighting, snippets, regex search, integrated shell/python console, bracket matching, etc. It’s light, flexible and can be tweaked how you want it, works with Gnome’s virtual filesystem as well, so I don’t even have to mount ftp or sftp directories to access them from within the editor.

    GEdit may be the notepad of Gnome/Ubuntu, but it’s quickly tweakable to be a lot more.

    :-)

    -Russ

    Reply  |  Quote
  18. garry UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Linux says:

    you forgot the obvious one. real hackers don’t use any of those, they write their own.
    mine is fred.

    Reply  |  Quote
  19. Alan Shutko UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    You know, Kate isn’t the only editor that can access remote files via ftp, ssh, or other protocols. Emacs has been doing that since before Kate was born.

    Reply  |  Quote
  20. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I guess I owe gedit users an apology. I didn’t realize that this editor was so extensible and versatile.

    [quote comment=”5670″]You know, Kate isn’t the only editor that can access remote files via ftp, ssh, or other protocols. Emacs has been doing that since before Kate was born.[/quote]

    Well, Emacs was pretty much doing *everything* under the sun since the beginning of time. Emacs can be used for drawing, playing games, fetching email, and etc.

    Reply  |  Quote
  21. Fr3d UNITED KINGDOM Safari Mac OS says:

    I think your post is biased towards Vi users :P

    That said, if it was me writing it it would probably be biased towards Nano :D

    However the editor I use depends on the OS I’m using. On Linux I can use Vi, but I find I can do everything faster in Nano. On Windows I like to use a basic “text” editor, but with a few extras like syntax highlighting and proper word-wrap/indenting etc, so I use EditPad Pro or TextPad (depending on what language of code I’m editing). I do use Dreamweaver (code-view only, as I can’t stand WYSIWYG) occasionally, but only as it has a built-in FTP client to update web pages quickly.

    Reply  |  Quote
  22. Fr3d UNITED KINGDOM Safari Mac OS says:

    A quick off-topic note: Your browser recognition plugin detects Safari incorrectly – it should say: 3.0.3 (522.12.1), rather than just 522.12.1 ;)

    Reply  |  Quote
  23. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    [quote comment=”5672″]I think your post is biased towards Vi users :P[/quote]

    I don’t know – I didn’t purposefully try to bias it towards vi. I tried my best to be objective. When I did the browser thing people said I was Opera user when in fact I’m a die hard Firefox person. It just came out that way.

    That said, I do use vi…

    [quote comment=”5673″]A quick off-topic note: Your browser recognition plugin detects Safari incorrectly – it should say: 3.0.3 (522.12.1), rather than just 522.12.1 ;)[/quote]

    Hmm… It might be a good time to update that plugin. :)

    Reply  |  Quote
  24. Matt Doar UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I vented my feelings about using Word for code at
    http://toolsmiths.blogspot.com/2007/06/word-doesnt-play-nicely-with-co de.html

    For me, it’s emacs for writing, compiling and debugging code across multiple platforms. grep, find for searching trees from within emacs. Language modes for syntax highlighting, paren matching etc. The only thing I haven’t found from other IDEs is easy refactoring support. If I’m on a box without emacs, then ed or sed is fast and simple.

    Now onto what says about me:

    Bushy beard – shaved it off after the second kid.
    Unix t-shirt – gave it to my brother
    PhD – it’s a fair cop.

    Reply  |  Quote
  25. jdmcfadden UNITED STATES Camino Mac OS says:

    SlickEdit. Fast, extensible, multiplatform. Great, great editor. Costs a bundle, but my boss pays. When I paid, I used UltraEdit.

    And if I have to do C#, I still use Visual Studio.

    Reply  |  Quote
  26. jbar UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Mac OS says:

    Oh shit! You totally forgot Jedit!

    Reply  |  Quote
  27. dezent SWEDEN Safari Mac OS says:

    uuhm.. im a VI user… but.. nano/pico ????

    Reply  |  Quote
  28. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    [quote comment=”5685″]uuhm.. im a VI user… but.. nano/pico ????[/quote]

    Yeah? What about them?

    Reply  |  Quote
  29. ergh… i r using Corel WordPerfect as my text editor?
    ;)

    Reply  |  Quote
  30. I actually use notepad++ it just works.

    Reply  |  Quote
  31. Dan Geer UNITED STATES Lynx says:

    TECO, where the test of mastery is simple: Describe, in advance, the effect of typing your full name while in command mode.

    Get it at http://almy.us/teco.html and donât say I didnât call you a wimp.

    Reply  |  Quote
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  33. mike mcc UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Mac OS says:

    BBEdit – because when I’m not a vim-using unix admin I’m a crusty Mac user who wonders what all the fuss about TextMate is.
    http://bbedit.com/

    Reply  |  Quote
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  35. Jason F UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Linux says:

    Bull computer
    HVS Version 6
    full screen editor: SCORPEO
    not bad.

    Reply  |  Quote
  36. Phil AUSTRALIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    What about edlin? I just fired it up for the first time in 15 years and still remembered how to add and delete lines!

    Reply  |  Quote
  37. Kate User UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox SuSE Linux says:

    Spot on. It is rare to find blogs on the internet with such accuracy.

    I can get by with vi or nedit, but I prefer kate. Aside from my list of quick fish:// bookmarks, there are some other neat features. Select some text, and use Tab and Shift-Tab to indent and unindent lots of code at the same time. Ctrl-D for comments (it knows which comment syntax to use automatically). Or hit Ctrl-Shift-B for “Block Selection.” Once you learn *when* to use block selection, you’ll use it all the time. The incremental search plugin, Word Completion, Javascript scripting, and sessions complete the deal.

    It is like having all the power of Emacs or an IDE, but without the commitment…and that may leave enough time in your life to meet a real three dimensional woman.

    Reply  |  Quote
  38. david mcq AUSTRALIA Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    BBEdit rools… but only for mac…

    now i’m 100% linux i’m reduced to vim …

    ah well

    Reply  |  Quote
  39. Westin UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    HA I was just about to ask about edlin myself….

    Reply  |  Quote
  40. Marko FINLAND Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Lol indeed, but my editor wasn’t even on the list!

    Programmer’s File Editor

    A very old editor, but I just like using it – misses a lot of features, though! :D

    Reply  |  Quote
  41. Yep, gedit has syntax highlighting. Hell, the color schemes are even configurable (I like the Tango one). I do a lot of spec file editing in gedit.

    Reply  |  Quote
  42. …and I’d like to register my strongest possible objection to your little browser / OS auto-detect system not auto-detecting Mandriva. :)

    Reply  |  Quote
  43. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Adam – are you using the binary downloaded from the mozilla site? If you do then your user agent says Linux. Most of the package maintainers will change that user agent string to something appropriate when they compile bundle it for your system.

    I had the same issue with Ubuntu Dapper. The current version of Firefox in Dapper repository is 1.5. No way I’m running that. So I had to go and modify the user agent value in about:config and now it detects properly.

    Reply  |  Quote
  44. Luke: no, I’m using the packaged version. The general.useragent.vendor string is Mandriva.

    Reply  |  Quote
  45. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Oh… Hmm… Well, then I have no answer for you. In my defense, I didn’t write this plugin. This guy did – so it’s his fault. :mrgreen:

    Reply  |  Quote
  46. okay, I will go persecute him instead then ;)

    Reply  |  Quote
  47. Wellingj UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Debian GNU/Linux says:

    Just wanted to say I enjoyed your article.
    vim all the way! Even on windows I use GVIM…
    Although I wish everthing worked like vim…
    I often end up with a lot of erroneous :w and dd
    and p in my .doc files… People think I’m retarded some times…

    Reply  |  Quote
  48. Flirek CROATIA Mozilla Windows says:

    vi for sysadm work, jedit for programing. and:

    joe /dev/sda when in trouble >:)

    which other editors can edit device?

    Reply  |  Quote
  49. Bill Poser CANADA Mozilla Firefox Linux says:

    I belong to a category that you didn’t mention: I use emacs and ed, emacs most frequently, ed for quick, little jobs and for certain things that I don’t know as well in emacs, such as complex regular expressions. I learned ed before emacs, but only by a few months, both at Bell Labs.
    I can use vi, but only know a few real vi commands – otherwise it is just a screen version of ed to which I escape constantly. I occasionally use Vim to edit Unicode text.

    Reply  |  Quote
  50. Tim SLOVENIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I use OpenOffice! You forgot to include that!
    Okay, just kidding… What I use really depends on what I’m doing.

    For quick edits, I just use Notepad in Win and Kate in Linux. For programming, I use Code::Blocks.
    For PHP, there’s Notepad or Kate (I have yet to find a good program with integrated FTP on win32… Mabye code my own? :) )

    Sometimes I use NVU for HTML (but NEVER WYSIWYG, only code!)
    For FTP, I use FireZilla Portable (got it on my USB flash drive).
    http://www.portableapps.com if anyone’s interested in getting a good FTP client which can be moved around :)

    Reply  |  Quote
  51. Tim SLOVENIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Oh yeah, and portableapps.com comes with Notepad++ portable… That seems to be a new addition (wasn’t there the last time I checked – checked right after the previous post). Time to see if it’s on good terms with USB ^^

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  53. Rand al'Thor NETHERLANDS Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Before linux, I used dos. And I did everything with the N* commander. On my first forays on linux (1999), I discovered mc, and havent used anything else since.

    Reply  |  Quote
  54. You forgot PSPad. It is great. I use it to code PHP.

    Reply  |  Quote
  55. Chandru INDIA Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Emacs does everything for me. I’m not very comfortable with the amount of switching needed between edit and command modes of Vim. But u do u feel Emacs users are LISP hackers. I’ve never done much with LISP. Of course I did copy a few code pieces from the Emacs docs.

    I do like Kate but since I’m from the text mode of GNU/Linux, I’m still a fan of Emacs.

    Reply  |  Quote
  56. RayL UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Hi Markko,
    I thought I was the only one left on the planet still using PFE (Programmer’s File Editor). I’m still trying to find a satisfactory replacement. Will probably be jedit.

    Reply  |  Quote
  57. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    [quote comment=”5726″]I often end up with a lot of erroneous :w and dd
    and p in my .doc files… People think I’m retarded some times…[/quote]

    LOL! I habitually hit Esc after I finish typing a line and want to move the cursor in almost every editor.

    Btw, I noticed people mention IDE’s. If it has a debugger, code completion, inline syntax checking and etc I didn’t count it as an editor but as an IDE.

    I use vim for all quick text editing, but I use IDE’s where appropriate. For example:

    Eclipse for Java
    MS Visual Studio for C#
    Komodo Edit for PHP, Javascript/HTML, Perl and the limited amount of Python I do
    Kile (lin) or Texniccenter (win) for LaTex (I use both mostly because there is no cross platform LaTex IDE that I would like)

    Oh, and I always use vim for bash scripting, and writing windows batch files.

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  59. Tim SLOVENIA Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    “MS Visual Studio for C#”
    *spits*

    I guess Code::Blocks can be considered a text editor if one’s crazy enough to use it as such ;)

    Reply  |  Quote
  60. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Heh. I always figured that if you are to code in an evil language (C#) you might as well use an evil IDE. Btw, you have to give it to MS – their IDE is a pretty solid product. I found it much more stable and pleasant to use than any of their Office products. :)

    If I ever get back into C++ I will give Code::Blocks a whirl. I’m so rusty in that language it is not even funny. Last time I touched C++ it was when we were doing a visual excitable media simulation on a cluster back in college. And at that time I was using Emacs via remote X connection to write the code.

    Before that it was HS where we were kicking it old school with a very old copy of Bordland. :)

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  61. libdave UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I find metapad works well with Vim

    http://liquidninja.com/metapad

    Reply  |  Quote
  62. Mark UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Linux says:

    Heh. I’m quite the character I think based on this. I have to work on multiple operating systems. I have a linux desktop and of course a slew of variously flavored unix servers where I use sed a lot for editing, vim for composing new things and coding, and ed still on occasion either when connecting to systems by methods to unstable for visual editors – or when working on a mud. (Which says a lot about me on its own I think), and yes, I do use mutt for email.

    I have a Mac laptop, where I use TextMate – kinda. I have a love-hate relationship. It’s an awesome editor – but not having vi keybindings means its like trying to work with my fingers tied together. But the terminals for the Mac all suck horribly which makes using VI in them a little painful.

    Occasionally I am required to work on windows servers. There, when I can actually /use/ a text editor, I far prefer to use edit. Back in the day I even used edlin. ;-)

    So – VIM, sed, ed, textmate, edit and edlin + mutt and for browsers dillo, links (not lynx), firefox, safari, and camino. (And yes, I do use icewm/windowmaker in some environments, like laptops. But I use enlightenment on my desktop)

    ;-) Somehow I think you just sum that up as ‘scary’ and move on.

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  63. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    [quote comment=”5745″];-) Somehow I think you just sum that up as ‘scary’ and move on.[/quote]

    One person’s definition of scary is another persons definition of awesome. ;)

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  64. Spiritraveller UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Nano is great for simplicity and an easy learning curve. It has more features than most people realize. It has syntax highlighting, and a good set of keystrokes for moving around. ^H and ^M work in nano, in case you prefer those to reaching for the delete or return key.

    There is also a new text editor optimized for the Dvorak keyboard layout. It’s called aoeui and can be found here, http://aoeui.sourceforge.net/.

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  65. Kevin Dean UNITED STATES says:

    I’ll use Nano when it’s availible. I use Vi over Pico, because Pico is not Free Software.

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  66. Ian Clifton UNITED STATES Lynx says:

    Very entertaining list. Anyone who can use Nano/Pico faster than they can use Vim just hasn’t learned what he/she is doing yet.

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  67. Daniele ITALY Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    What about InType?

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  68. chemicalscum CANADA Internet Explorer Windows says:

    I am just testing out how well your user agent identifier program works. By the way Luke you need to patch your Firefox on Ubuntu

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  69. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Ian you rule for using Lynx to post this. LOL You magnificent bastard, you! Unless of course you are cheating and spoofing the user agent!

    [quote comment=”5761″]By the way Luke you need to patch your Firefox on Ubuntu[/quote]

    I already patched it and was running 2.0.0.6… At least I thought I did.

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  70. chemicalscum CANADA Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I am back with my real user-agent identifier after being set at IE 7 on Vista.

    So back to editors. When I was a grad student 18 years ago I had to learn vi as my supervisor used it. I hated compared to quickedit on DOS which I used at the time. Ten years later when I started using Linux at home I decided to get into Emacs and became a devotee of the Church of Emacs and abhorred the editor of the beast vi-vi-vi.

    The one day I had system problems and had to edit config files in a terminal. I decided to fire up Emacs, then I discovered that I had been using Emacs all the time on X and been using the pull down menus. I had not really remembered all the key-bindings. So I switched back into vi edited the files, restored the system and saved the day. I became a lot more appreiative of vi after that and use vi a lot now mostly for editing config files.

    Most of the time I use Gedit now. It is very flexible. I have been trying to learn Ruby in it and it has an excellent LaTeX plugin maybe not as powerful as Emacs with Auctex but still very good.

    I have just noticed that the Firefox spell checker accepts Emacs and vim as correct but Xemacs and gvim are errors.

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  71. Ian Clifton UNITED STATES Lynx says:

    No spoofing. I use Lynx for testing accessibility and browsing here and there. Mostly, I develop/browse using FF, because of great extensions like Firebug.

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  72. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I love firebug!

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  73. Pingback: roothausen » Editor Typen GERMANY WordPress

  74. Scott Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    You forgot SEU.

    SEU: The people that use SEU are old and colours other than green and black hurt their eyes.

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  75. Dave UNITED STATES Galeon Debian GNU/Linux says:

    Don’t forget “cat”…

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  76. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    [quote comment=”5770″]Don’t forget “cat”…[/quote]

    Actually, I wouldn’t call cat (or more, less and other such tools) a text editor. They are more text utilities. And none of them can actually edit text.

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  77. Anze SLOVENIA Konqueror Debian GNU/Linux says:

    fte? Am I the only one still using it? I wonder what that says about me… ;)

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  78. atrox GERMANY Mozilla Firefox Debian GNU/Linux says:

    Great Article!

    Im a vi User!

    and Emacs, nano/pico, … all SUCKs ;)

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  79. Pingback: Cloudy Thinking » Blog Archive » Łukasz G. Maciak: What does your favorite text editor say about you? UNITED STATES WordPress

  80. hooya UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Debian GNU/Linux says:

    i, sir, am appalled at your insinuation that emacs is a text editor. ‘fundamental-mode’ is the text editor. emacs is the OS. linux is the BIOS. get your facts straight. :P

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  81. STop DENMARK Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Wanna try something different? Go for “J” ;-)
    http://armedbear-j.sourceforge.net/

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  82. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    J looks kinda like emacs. :)

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  83. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Oh crap – they implemented Lisp compiler in Java. I find that kinda awesome!

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  84. Ashton CANADA Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Seeing as you have already apologized I wont hang too much on you for your prior comment on Gedit. However I will say it is simple, slick, uncluttered, syntax-able, and plugins for everything under the sun…. All that being said, a textmate port to linux could make me switch religions.

    Vi & Emac users need to embrace the future :-)

    However, in a non-gui environment short files i use nano, large files or multiple files emacs begins to shine in its original glory

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  85. fwolf GERMANY Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I’m missing KWrite – I dont need no stinking bloated Kate!
    Best about it is: Works in Fluxbox and Xfce, too – while still being able to work with a decent editor (eg. code highlighting) ;)

    cu, w0lf.

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  86. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Ah! Kwrite. Forgot about that one too. Isn’t Kwrite the actual text editor component in Kmail?

    Here is my pet peeve about Kate – it does not support inline spellcheck (also known as the squiggly line). Therefore none of the IDE like products based on Kate like Quanta, Kile and KDevelop do not have it.

    KMail on the other hand is able to do it. So I’m guessing they are not actually using Kate. Can anyone clarify this?

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  87. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    [quote post=”1843″]Vi & Emac users need to embrace the future [/quote]

    Vi users have . . . It is called Vim. ;-)

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  88. fwolf GERMANY Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    @ Luke: AFAIK KWrite is a seperate editor, although based on Katepart.

    And who the hell needs spellchecking? Thats IMNSHO one of the most annoying “features” ANY text editor could have and the first option I turn OFF! X-(
    Usually those dont work with German, anyway.

    cu, w0lf.

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  89. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    @Craig:

    LOL!

    Would Xemacs be “the future” for Emacs users then?

    In all seriousness though, I think it is evident by the number of comments here, and the activity on the Vim website that the editor is doing quite well, and is far from being dead.

    I actually believe that my grand, grand children will still be using Vi and Emacs long after I’m dead. Unless of course they decide to be clueless lusers that is. In which case I will be forced to haunt them from beyond the grave until they get a clue. :mrgreen:

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  90. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    [quote comment=”5826″]And who the hell needs spellchecking? Thats IMNSHO one of the most annoying “features” ANY text editor could have and the first option I turn OFF! X-(
    Usually those dont work with German, anyway.[/quote]

    I do! I make tons of typos, and I like having an inline spellcheck. I mean I can either check my spelling as I type, or spend 5 minutes after I finish clicking ignore/replace on a standard spellcheck dialog.

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  91. Edwin_Campbell UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    back in the very dim times (very very dim) my editor of choice was ISPF or the pc version SPF-PC..over the last 20-30 or so years it has always been vi….

    edwin….

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  92. Kjartan ICELAND Internet Explorer Windows says:

    Hi for those of you who are hooked on Vi/Vim functionality (or just interested in learning it) but use Word for word processing and Visual studio for writing dotNet or c++ apps you can do like I did and install a Vi emulator for these products and now I have almost all of the Vi/Vim functionality in Visual Studio and Word/Outlook

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  93. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    On think about those emulators and Vi-key-binding plugins is that they give you basic Vi functionality. A lot of the cool stuff from recent versions of Vim remains unimplemented or unsupported.

    So if you are a heavy vim user you will sometimes feel limited.

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  94. UNITED STATES Epiphany Linux says:

    Give aoeui a try if you use Dvorak, or its QWERTY version, asdfg. Its navigate/select/operate paradigm is very fast and intuitive, like editing with a mouse but without having to remove your hands from the keyboard. I think that it’s available in debian now, too.

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  95. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I love your name Mr. ☠ LOL! Thanks for the tip!

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  96. Kjartan ICELAND Internet Explorer Windows says:

    Well Luke, I don’t consider myself a Vi/Vim pro but my experience is that the plugin I’m using is good enough for me. It has register, visual mode, command mode, macros and more

    ViEmu I like this plug-in a lot

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  97. Dan UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I know these descriptions are very lighthearted… but where the heck did you get the idea that GEdit is like the Notepad of Linux??

    Maybe version 0.1 of GEdit was just like Notepad, but it’s far and away more powerful in its current incarnation:
    * Notepad is just a text box in a window, with load/save/change font plunked on top of it.
    * GEdit supports syntax highlighting, spell checking, context-sensitive development help, auto-indenting… and just about anything else you can write a plugin for

    It’s not a “kitchen sink”-type editor like Emacs, but it does everything all of the more powerful Windows editors do. It’s more like Notepad2++ or TextPad in its level of capabilities.

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