TUI-nano (you vi people are insane. I will die on this hill) GUI-as long as it’s not ms word, I could give a damn

I’ve used so many over the years. Sublime was really cool for a bit. Notepad++ and UltraEdit look like ass but they were both daily drivers for a long time. These days I bounce between codium and vim throughout the day. I kinda hate codium/vscode but I use it for the same reason I’ve used vim for so long: it’s functional and available everywhere.

I should really give one of the newer vim clones a closer look one of these days.

• fave: vim
• first: ED-IT?
• future: vim
• honorable mention: emacs
• loathed: ed
• current: vim
• longest: vi

vim is basically my foreverhome at this point. I feel clumsy trying to use most other things. But I also like emacs shortcuts and learned a bunch of them unwittingly via bash having that mode set out of the box.

First? Notepad

Now?

Kate

Favorite: Helix Future: Helix Current: Helix Loathed: Anything with JavaScript, a mandated GUI, or non-modal keybinds First: Vim Longest: Helix Honorable mention: Kakoune

That’s fun! I’m currently comming from Neovim to see if Emacs is for me. I’ve only really used Neovim for half a year and Emacs for less than a week so who knows? I’ve actually only been sent on this rollercoaster ride by JetBrains trying to sneak AI training data collection into IntelliJ almost a year ago, eventually being annoyed by how clanky Eclipse is. Am I annoyed by Neovim? No, not at all, I just want to see if I like Emacs even better.

Fave is (Doom) Emacs, even though I haven’t used it in a while. It was fun and mostly painless to customize it a tad with no prior Lisp experience. Things like Org Mode and Org Babel let me write a short story around my code blocks if I needed one to remember concepts, purposes, etc in a language I was tinkering with. They could execute in-document or I could tangle them to where they belonged. That just seemed brilliant to me. It being essentially an eLisp interpreter at its core, with the editor functionality and everything else built on top, it was neat being able to just pop open an interpreter window or tab and use what I learned for quick calculations or whatever. Previously I’d open a new terminal or tmux pane and use Python for that purpose. And currently mostly Bash and CLI utils over Python.

Pretty sure my first was EDIT.COM on MS-DOS but I would’ve been a single-digit age at the time and mostly clueless so I say notepad.exe instead. The window in which I used DOS was very short before the family computer started running Win 3.1. Then 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista… every version except 2000 and 8. We had 8 long enough to back up our data and revert to 7

Future, I’ll probably keep trucking with nvim.

Honorable mention, gedit. My first GUI editor on Linux desktop before I leaned heavy into CLI applications.

Loathed, VSCode. I’m not a dev so it was just too much. A Vim plugin made it usable for editing, and I liked how easy plugins were to find/install, but I’m not a dev and full IDEs are wasted on me. Same reason I finally stopped trying to turn nvim into one and minimized my plugins for it.

Current is nvim. I like modal editing and its particular keybinds. I like regex search and find/replace. Multiline editing, motions, and macros defined on the fly. I bet I haven’t read 2% of the built-in documentation and know it already does more than I’d ever need right out of the box. For the same reason I still often find neat things I didn’t know about it and try to commit to memory for my future editing.

Longest is n/vim. That probably won’t ever change for the same reasons above.

I’m honestly torn between Nvim and Emacs right now. I’m a long time vim user and been on Nvim for 10+ years. The rate at which they change config methods kinda drives me nuts. The change from vimscript to lua, and then a new mixup of lua to another syntax of lua, NEED TO CHANGE THE LUA!!! It’s too much. I really did a yearly config rewrite for a while because the plugin ecosystem moves lightning fast. Now most of the time I feel like I’m using a half baked config solution even on a new from scratch setup.

Emacs feels like a breath of fresh air. I’m still working out the kinks but it feels like it just works when I tell it to do something. I’m not using evil mode. I dove head first into vanilla and it’s been really nice. ELisp is wild. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing with it, but it all seems to be working. The fact that it took me 3 days to get my Emacs setup to where I am with Nvim and beyond was a great start to the switch. I’m really enjoying Emacs and there’s definitely a past version of me going ‘What the fuck’ right now.

Fave: vim First: vim Future: vim Honorable mention: vim Loathed: anything other than vim Current: vim Longest: believe it or not, vim

Fave: I don’t really do favourites, but I tend to reach for nano because it’s usually installed and I prefer it to the vi family.

First: The 8-bit Commodore screen editor was hard to beat for its time, so let’s go with that, even though I probably used the BBC Micro arrow / copy system before that.

Future: Heck if I know. I installed micro but haven’t touched it yet. Maybe one day I’ll get around to that. Or an IDE. So probably nano.

Honourable mention: An editor I worked on for a project once. There’s something to be said for editing an editor’s source code inside itself.

Loathed: ed / edlin

Current: Let’s go with nano again, but I do lot more typing on command lines and in browser text boxes, like this one.

Longest: If pico counts as proto-nano, then definitely nano. Been using that since the '90s.

Fave: vim
First: notepad.exe
Future: vim
Honorable mention: vi
Loathed: Everything but (neo)?vim?
Current: vim
Longest: vim

writing a text editor in a shell language is certainly… a choice. also this kinda feels like an ad for your own project.

anyway i’ve gone notepad, np++, eclipse, sublime, atom, vim, nvim, back to vim, then vis, then vim again, and now helix, which i’ll hopefully stick with a while. worst has gotta be the GMod Wiremod Expression editor. honorable mention to acme.

Fave: Kate

First: GNOME Text Editor

Future: Kate

Honourable Mention: Notepadqq used it for a after when I first switched from Windows where I used Notepad++

Least Liked: Vim

Current: Kate

Most used: Kate

For anything CLI related I use Micro.

Fave: micro
First: nano
Future: eMacs? Honorable mention: helix Loathed: vim/neovim Current: micro Longest: micro

I’m a micro fanboy.

• Neovim for terminal
• Sublime for GUI
• Word for when i’m feeling masochistic (jk)
• Notepad++ was first