Your Preferred Text Editor

[jaymatter]

Vim and my Ergodox go well together for me. I'll also give tmux a shout out because it saves me so much time when moving between home and office.  )

[iri]

As others have said, its common to 'imap' jj or something similar to escape (I use 'jk' myself)

If you use the program keyremap4macbook (I think that is what its called) you can do the following:

bind caps lock to ctrl (skip if you have hardware hhkb)
search for "Control_L to Control_L" in the program, there is a setting that, when toggled, will send esc on key up if no other keys were pressed, or normal ctrl when pressed with any other keys.

I use this on my macbook, caps lock is much easier to access than control.

caps lock is certainly of course mapped to control on all my machines. i wonder why not everyone more or less geeky does that. when i go help a colleague and use their keyboard and it happens to be a logitech k120 with caps lock as caps lock, i tell them i want to smash their head with an axe. then they actually ask me to do the remapping.

thank for sharing your idea on caps lock as esc in mac os. it is convenient. though i think implementing this in linux would be a bit harder.

[1pq]

For any Mac users looking for a good free text editor akin to notebook++, check out TextWrangler. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textwrangler/id404010395

I much prefer sublime text. I have yet to see any other text editor running on OS X outside of the terminal that has so much power and flexibility. Although it's not free, you can keep using the unregistered version with all of the features enabled indefinitely. Soon enough, however, you'll like it so much that you'll want to pay the developer! (At least that's what happened for me )

[jmchargue]

Checking in for Vim.

I mapped Esc to kj, and escape and write to lkj. There's a nice little rhythm to saving things

[iri]

my save is mapped to ,s

[ch_123]

Mainly vim. I also use Sublime every once in a while

[jeffgran]

Emacs, the One True Operating System.

Constantly tweaking. Config lives here: https://github.com/zachallaun/emacs-config

^ This. Mine is here: https://github.com/jeffgran/my-emacs

[eisenhower]

After a long vim session I find k's and j's all over whatever non-vim document I'm working on

[jeffgran]

After a long vim session I find k's and j's all over whatever non-vim document I'm working on

LOL.

Btw, that doesn't happen with emacs navigation commands. In fact, many of the basic emacs navigation commands work by default in the terminal and in most OSX (maybe linux too?) text boxes/windows.

[nuclearsandwich]

After a long vim session I find k's and j's all over whatever non-vim document I'm working on

LOL.

Btw, that doesn't happen with emacs navigation commands. In fact, many of the basic emacs navigation commands work by default in the terminal and in most OSX (maybe linux too?) text boxes/windows.

The emacs bindings are all over the place in OS X because they're part of the native text widgets. This is not the case by default in any of the primary toolkits on Linux and Chrome on OS X explicitly turns them off. People who write software can be such jerks.

[mreverything]

One more for TextWrangler on OS X. I don't really use it for coding, but I write just about everything in it, then convert using pandoc. Starting to learn vim, but I'll probably stick to TextWrangler and iTerm for now.

But seriously, whether you use Vim, Emacs, TextMate or TextWrangler, three cheers for the Solarized color palette!

[nuclearsandwich]

But seriously, whether you use Vim, Emacs, TextMate or TextWrangler, three cheers for the Solarized color palette!

Have you seen the spherical keyset group buy based on the Solarized palette?

[angelic_sedition]

Unite has been making the rounds among vim nerds at my workplace.  I need to check it out still, but it looks pretty cool.

"I love ctrl-p but it is so last year."

For people that are using an old editor they sure do like the latest plugins.

Hey it's not like vim is abandonware or anything, and unite is pretty awesome

i think that using the esc key to go to normal mode in vim is a bad idea. just sayin'. not that anyone cares.

Well like mooswa said, you can just remap it to anything you want. I still use escape, but I've mapped caps+s or w in the past to esc.

Others have suggested jj, jk, etc, but two keys in a row is too much for something that's used so frequently as far as I'm concerned.

As others have said, its common to 'imap' jj or something similar to escape (I use 'jk' myself)

If you use the program keyremap4macbook (I think that is what its called) you can do the following:

bind caps lock to ctrl (skip if you have hardware hhkb)
search for "Control_L to Control_L" in the program, there is a setting that, when toggled, will send esc on key up if no other keys were pressed, or normal ctrl when pressed with any other keys.

I use this on my macbook, caps lock is much easier to access than control.

caps lock is certainly of course mapped to control on all my machines. i wonder why not everyone more or less geeky does that. when i go help a colleague and use their keyboard and it happens to be a logitech k120 with caps lock as caps lock, i tell them i want to smash their head with an axe. then they actually ask me to do the remapping.

thank for sharing your idea on caps lock as esc in mac os. it is convenient. though i think implementing this in linux would be a bit harder.

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings), though I'm not sure how easy it would be to have a different output based on whether or not other keys are pressed at the same time. I'll probably try it when I get the time. There aren't really enough remapping options to satisfy me on any os at the moment.


Also, am I the only one who hates solarized?

[iri]

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer

because they want a control key and not an entirely new layer.

Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings), though I'm not sure how easy it would be to have a different output based on whether or not other keys are pressed at the same time.

in other words, you have no idea about how to implement that.

[mreverything]

Have you seen the spherical keyset group buy based on the Solarized palette?

I have. It looks so smart. One of first non-otaku sets I'm excited about. 4 days left!

[nullstring]

gvim/vim for the bulk of my edits.
I also use notepad++ and sublime text sometimes.

[nullstring]

nevermind, got it.

[yakitysax]

Sure it's "old", but it's still under regular maintenance, and very active plugin development.

I think "regular maintenance" is selling short how active the developer mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/vim_dev) is. Probably the most significant user facing changes from 7.3 to 7.4 (of which there were over 1100 commits) were the new regex engine, a new optional tweak of the how relative line number behaves (absolute at point, relative around point), and a more comprehensive Python API for writing Vim plugins. Vim's still evolving, and an eventual Python API that is on par with vimscript will be game changing for greater community involvement.

One tweak I made on my personal setup was to overload my capslock key to act as control when used as a modifier and escape otherwise, which in retrospect was something obvious to do but had no occurred to me to overload keys in that way before.

Steve Losh's article on making a Modern Space Cadet turned me onto not only doing that but also overloading other keys that the idea was applicable to (http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/), which in my case was Backspace and Enter.

[hashbaz]

I've been using vim daily for 6 years with no large new core features.  Internal improvements and minor tweaks are great -- but I would call that maintenance.  That's not a criticism; I think vim's feature set is at a great local maximum.  There's always more stuff you can add, but it's extremely usable as-is.

Making vim properly embedable in larger environments springs to mind as a large user-facing feature I'd like to see, and would strike a workable balance between the IDE faction and the text editor faction.

[angelic_sedition]

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer

because they want a control key and not an entirely new layer.

Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings), though I'm not sure how easy it would be to have a different output based on whether or not other keys are pressed at the same time.

in other words, you have no idea about how to implement that.

Why not have both? And have you considered that maybe some people want the capslock key? It's a matter of preference.


Well it depends on exactly what you want to implement. Simply switching caps to escape or control would be simple. In other words, I don't know how easy it would be to do both (exactly as I said). I do know how you would go about trying it. You might be able to do it just by using xdotool to send escape on keyup and then bind it with something like xbindkeys or sxhkd. I haven't tested it though. I don't find the feature particularly enticing. Alternatively, for this behaviour just in vim, you could just map control to escape in insert mode and then still use control normally in normal mode if you needed it for something.

Edit: Above causes no accidental escapes, but I decided to look into it. And it took me about ten minutes to find xcape among other programs that add the same functionality, so yes, it is easy. If you have caps set up as Control_L with xmodmap: "xcape -e "Control_L=Escape"

[TacticalCoder]

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings),...

Same here... Heavy remapping on my HHKB Pro2, using the key at the left and right of the spacebar as separate modifiers (one is Alt, the other is a new modifier). Then I only use "modifier + key that you can reach without your pinky": so I can hit my new modifier with my thumb and have a new layer that is "pinky friendly" by, well, never requiring the pinkies 

In addition to heavily remapping my keyboard I did also completely remap Emacs (I think the default Emacs shortcuts are simply insane) and several Emacs mode too.  For example ace-jump-mode which I use all the time: I've configured it to only use strong fingers and never requiring characters that would need to be typed by the pinkies (so I removed a few letters, but I added 2,3,4 and 7,8,9, which I touch-type).

Now I ordered Hasu's "alternative controller" for the HHKB Pro 2 so that I can do all my key remappings and layering directly at the "keyboard level", without the OS having any say in the matter (which I think in the end shall prove more convenient than xmodmap / xkb).

[domoaligato]

I love Notepad++
just make sure you get the plugins you need. it has all the features of any licensed alternatives if you download all the plugins you need.

[iri]

ironically, two best text editors are free.

[1pq]

on the mac: sublime text 3
everywhere else: vim

Thank god, someone else who has seen the light.
<3 sublime

[TacticalCoder]

Thank god, someone else who has seen the light.

Ah, that's it: now god comes in.  It's official: the editors war becomes... Religious! 

You can pry my Emacs from my cold dead hands, you pagans! 

Btw I know that Emacs can do arbitrary computation (any computation, as in "using elisp") directly in substitution strings and that vim certainly can do computation in substitution strings. What about other editors? Is this something they can do too? (this is not a stab: I'm genuinely curious)

This thread lacks animated .gifs about our preferred text editors...

Complains (say about color scheme or font -- btw, it's a pixel-perfect font and the .gif is correct but for whatever resizing reason when inlined in GH the .gif is stretched and becomes all blurry... whatever) and hate can be safely sent to /dev/null :



I did use vr/replace instead of replace-regexp to show the grouping / replacement.

Basically in the replacement string:

Code: [Select]

\,(+ \#2 (* 60 \#1))
\#2 and \#1 are references to the regexp group (which, in this case, transform minutes:seconds into seconds) and

Code: [Select]

\,(...) is the real magic: you can put any elisp code you want in here. Here it's just simple arithmetic but you can really do anything you want.

This is from a recent question on SO about how to use vim to do such a thing. Someone posted a 22 keystrokes (!) version using Emacs.

The video is recorded using ffmpeg from a shell running... Inside Emacs! (I made the window tiny to be nice with GH's bandwith).

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

[yakitysax]

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

Being able to use real Emacs like one can with eclim with IDEA would be amazing. I am glad other editors exist though to inspire new ideas for absorbing into emacs and vim; snippets were popularized by textmate for instance, sublime text popularized fuzzy matching/multiple cursors, and sam/acme inspired things like expand-region, all of which are available in emacs and vim nowadays.

[iri]

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

Being able to use real Emacs like one can with eclim with IDEA would be amazing

why emacs and not vim? emacs has everything but a decent text editor. vim is mostly a decent text editor.

[yakitysax]

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

Being able to use real Emacs like one can with eclim with IDEA would be amazing

why emacs and not vim? emacs has everything but a decent text editor. vim is mostly a decent text editor.

Either one would be great. Jetbrains (company that develops IDEA) usually nails the integration and various levels of code comprehension part well with their tooling but the actual editing and code navigation part is less fluid in comparison to either of my setups with vim or emacs (through evil-mode mainly, which implements vim's grammar).

[iri]

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

Being able to use real Emacs like one can with eclim with IDEA would be amazing

why emacs and not vim? emacs has everything but a decent text editor. vim is mostly a decent text editor.

Either one would be great. Jetbrains (company that develops IDEA) usually nails the integration and various levels of code comprehension part well with their tooling but the actual editing and code navigation part is less fluid in comparison to either of my setups with vim or emacs (through evil-mode mainly, which implements vim's grammar).

Don't worry, I will soon join Jetbrains and make it perfect.

[yakitysax]

As far I know the text editor in big IDEs are very, very limited which is why I welcome project like eclim and emacs-eclim which allow to use vim or Emacs as your text editor and Eclipse as the server... If only the same existed for IntelliJ IDEA (I know there's at least one such project going on). Maybe that in ten years we'll have something like Grok (from Google / Steve Yegge) catching on and we'll be able to use the editor we want within any IDE (Grok is about much more than that but it should have the benefit of being usable as a back-end for the editor we want as I understand it).

Being able to use real Emacs like one can with eclim with IDEA would be amazing

why emacs and not vim? emacs has everything but a decent text editor. vim is mostly a decent text editor.

Either one would be great. Jetbrains (company that develops IDEA) usually nails the integration and various levels of code comprehension part well with their tooling but the actual editing and code navigation part is less fluid in comparison to either of my setups with vim or emacs (through evil-mode mainly, which implements vim's grammar).

Don't worry, I will soon join Jetbrains and make it perfect.

That is really my only quibble with their products, they are otherwise perfect and IDEA is irreplaceable. Even at a certain company that has an alternative Java IDE they use IDEA instead of their own internally it is so good.

[phatdood9]

I wish I had a little time to really get into emacs.

Emacs with evil mode seems really really nice. I just can't take a real big hit in productivity right now 

[terran5992]

Just tried notedpad++

Great for writing codes

[adhoc]

I really, really like Notepad++ for the obvious reasons however the upper limit of files size that can be opened usually makes it unusable for me and I need to go to ultra edit. I'm usually working with huge text files (inputs and outputs of calculation analyses) which can easily go over the limit of Notepad++ (which is 1gb I believe).

And Vi for remote files stuff ofc.

[terran5992]

I really, really like Notepad++ for the obvious reasons however the upper limit of files size that can be opened usually makes it unusable for me and I need to go to ultra edit. I'm usually working with huge text files (inputs and outputs of calculation analyses) which can easily go over the limit of Notepad++ (which is 1gb I believe).

And Vi for remote files stuff ofc.

Are there really text files that big 0.o

[adhoc]

Yes. I work with FEA solvers calculating with 5mil+ degrees of freedom. Text files are usually enormous.

[iri]

That is really my only quibble with their products

well, i have many quibbles with their products...

[TacticalCoder]

That is really my only quibble with their products, they are otherwise perfect and IDEA is irreplaceable. Even at a certain company that has an alternative Java IDE they use IDEA instead of their own internally it is so good.

Oh definitely... I have my fully paid license of IDEA and I'm a user since IntelliJ IDEA version 4 or so and I think it totally rocks.

I'm probably one of the user here using IDEA since the longest time (back when it was actually hardly usable on Linux: using green threads IIRC and ugly fonts etc. yet I was already a believer).

So, yeah, JetBrains do allow us Emacs / vi(m) / Sublime Text / etc. users to plug in your beloved text editor right in the middle of your IDE, like eclim! (but better)   

(this thread started as a holy war for the best text editor and then everyone agrees that IDEA is the best IDE !? !? !?)

[iri]

i do agree that idea is currently the best java ide. but it has its quirks.
oh, and version 13 looks much more awesome on linux.

[angelic_sedition]

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer

because they want a control key and not an entirely new layer.

Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings), though I'm not sure how easy it would be to have a different output based on whether or not other keys are pressed at the same time.

in other words, you have no idea about how to implement that.

Why not have both? And have you considered that maybe some people want the capslock key? It's a matter of preference.


Well it depends on exactly what you want to implement. Simply switching caps to escape or control would be simple. In other words, I don't know how easy it would be to do both (exactly as I said). I do know how you would go about trying it. You might be able to do it just by using xdotool to send escape on keyup and then bind it with something like xbindkeys or sxhkd. I haven't tested it though. I don't find the feature particularly enticing. Alternatively, for this behaviour just in vim, you could just map control to escape in insert mode and then still use control normally in normal mode if you needed it for something.

Edit: Above causes no accidental escapes, but I decided to look into it. And it took me about ten minutes to find xcape among other programs that add the same functionality, so yes, it is easy. If you have caps set up as Control_L with xmodmap: "xcape -e "Control_L=Escape"

I keep accidentally quoting myself instead of editing. Sorry. Feel free to delete this post.

[rowdy]

I wonder why people would just settle with control as opposed to an entirely new layer

because they want a control key and not an entirely new layer.

Implementing that on linux is actually very easy with xmodmap or xkb (I'm on linux with heavy remappings), though I'm not sure how easy it would be to have a different output based on whether or not other keys are pressed at the same time.

in other words, you have no idea about how to implement that.

Why not have both? And have you considered that maybe some people want the capslock key? It's a matter of preference.


Well it depends on exactly what you want to implement. Simply switching caps to escape or control would be simple. In other words, I don't know how easy it would be to do both (exactly as I said). I do know how you would go about trying it. You might be able to do it just by using xdotool to send escape on keyup and then bind it with something like xbindkeys or sxhkd. I haven't tested it though. I don't find the feature particularly enticing. Alternatively, for this behaviour just in vim, you could just map control to escape in insert mode and then still use control normally in normal mode if you needed it for something.

Edit: Above causes no accidental escapes, but I decided to look into it. And it took me about ten minutes to find xcape among other programs that add the same functionality, so yes, it is easy. If you have caps set up as Control_L with xmodmap: "xcape -e "Control_L=Escape"

I keep accidentally quoting myself instead of editing. Sorry. Feel free to delete this post.

Quoting yourself is like talking to yourself

[xandr]

vim if I only have access to the console and Sublime Text everywhere else.

[swill]

vim if I only have access to the console and Sublime Text everywhere else.

Same...

Gotta love that dark solarized in sublime text.

Can't wait for penumbra set to match my editor.

[xandr]

vim if I only have access to the console and Sublime Text everywhere else.

Same...

Gotta love that dark solarized in sublime text.

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

[swill]

vim if I only have access to the console and Sublime Text everywhere else.

Same...

Gotta love that dark solarized in sublime text.

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

Why fork it?  If you like soda, use soda.

[daerid]

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

Finally, somebody else. I loathe the solarized theme. After a few minutes it gives me a headache, without fail.

[swill]

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

Finally, somebody else. I loathe the solarized theme. After a few minutes it gives me a headache, without fail.

Light or dark?  I don't like light, but after using dark for a couple days I started to fall in love.

[daerid]

Either. I'm not a big fan of warm colors in general, but the low contrast between the blues of the dark theme just bugs the crap out of my eyes.

[swill]

Either. I'm not a big fan of warm colors in general, but the low contrast between the blues of the dark theme just bugs the crap out of my eyes.

I did change the selection color cause it bugged me.

[xandr]

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

Why fork it?  If you like soda, use soda.

I forked it because I made a few modifications. I basically mixed elements of both the light and dark themes. Nothing major but still enough to fork it so I can easily merge any updates from Ian without having to do my mods again.

It's definitely not a "look, I improved Soda lots" release. More a convenience thing for myself.

[swill]

I'm not actually a fan of the solarized scheme and made my own which is included with my fork of the Soda Theme. (It's on the package manager as well)

Why fork it?  If you like soda, use soda.

I forked it because I made a few modifications. I basically mixed elements of both the light and dark themes. Nothing major but still enough to fork it so I can easily merge any updates from Ian without having to do my mods again.

It's definitely not a "look, I improved Soda lots" release. More a convenience thing for myself.

Gotcha. Ya Git is an awesome tool. I don't miss the dark days of SVN.