Why does nobody mention nedit ? It may look spartan and very “X11” but it is very efficient and fast.

I put notepad++, but I actually believe that TextEdit is the best. Of course, this is because I’m running Mac OS X, which might have something to do with it.

Oh, and Stickies. God, I love Stickies. What would I do without you pasted all over my virtual desk reminding me of key information that I think of late in the night?

@luke this whole modifier-problem is something i too dislike… no keyboard should have keys with 3-5 uses printed on them (and still my netbook has.. like =,0,} and * on one key) this is just plainly wrong.

But if you’ve got enough space (and besides notebooks and smaller devices everyone will have) you should allways be able to use it a way this should not be needed. But the keyboard-manufacturers never even tried. Much more important than special-writing-keyboards where the ones for gaming or multimedia. When there is the possibility of making money by selling keyboards with modified WASD-Blocks, why wont anyone buy keyboars with arrow-keys near the character-keys? its the same purpose!

I currently use (X)emacs, but I am teaching myself to write the to the disk directly by waving magnets over the hard drive platters…..:)

@Dr. Azrael Tod and @Ian Clifton – only this is really not a hardware problem. It is something much more complex. End users don’t want to deal with modal editors. They want WYSIWYG and character keys that always work like character keys.

Custom keyboard layout or custom hardware would still have to solve the problem of using the same keys for character input and movement. Most likely you would have use a modifier key – something like Ctrl+h, Ctrl+j and etc..

That’s certainly an interesting way of looking at it. We’re lucky if the arrow keys are even set up “correctly” on a keyboard these days (why do so many put the left/right keys against each other?). I don’t think it’s a problem that will ever be solved on the hardware end, so you have to do what you can to get around that problem.

my problem with vim and its “less work for your fingers” is that i think its the wrong way to solve this problem.
As example: vim uses hjkl for coursor-movement, so you dont need to move your fingers away from the main part of the keyboard to the arrow-keys. This is because and could have been solved via the keyboard-layout. This way this would be solved for EVERY application. Instead nearly every developer uses vim, so they dont see this problem and it will never be solved for the average user.

@Dr. Azrael Tod: Probably because it takes sunlight to kill trolls, and the users of Vim/Emacs don’t get much sun…. I like Vim because it seems like less work for my fingers. Mankind’s inventions are all about laziness.

I use vim with combination of vim sessions, project- and tags plugin. Makes it a lot easier to jump between files.

Also knowing some jump-commands helps a lot (like gf)

Always meant to learn emacs, but never have taken the time to do it. I keep hearing that vim is better than nano, but the interface is different enough that I’d have to have a good reason to switch, and really since the extent of my coding is minor alterations to other people’s code I’ve never had a reason to use anything but nano.