[HN Gopher] Lesser Known Terminal Editors
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Lesser Known Terminal Editors
        
       Author : Fudgel
       Score  : 63 points
       Date   : 2021-06-12 03:34 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (codeberg.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (codeberg.org)
        
       | rascul wrote:
       | I used setedit some few decades ago.
       | 
       | http://setedit.sourceforge.net/
        
       | fouc wrote:
       | I've always wondered if there was an editor like QEDIT on MSDOS,
       | but remade for linux. qedit was miles better than nano.
        
       | peterhil wrote:
       | I would add Emacs style editors to the list:
       | 
       | - zile - mg - qemacs
       | 
       | I use zile almost daily for small edits.
        
         | dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
         | zile is great, it's only major problem being lack of Unicode
         | support
        
         | Hemospectrum wrote:
         | Worth noting, mg has long been included in OpenBSD as the
         | default Emacs-like editor, and now plays the same role in Mac
         | OS. (I'm not sure if Apple distributes the same branch as the
         | one maintained in OpenBSD, though.)
        
           | sys_64738 wrote:
           | Wow. I didn't even know this mg existed and see it's
           | installed already on Catalina. I love discovering new stuff
           | like this!
        
         | forgotpwd16 wrote:
         | Alongside the well-known ones, and Zile, another GNU text
         | editor is Moe.
        
       | boardwaalk wrote:
       | Probably ought to be called 'terminal-based editors'. Though I
       | suppose you could edit a terminal('s source code) with one of
       | these. </pedantry>
        
       | TylerE wrote:
       | jed is the one I have fond memories of. Back before I could
       | manage vi or emacs, it provided a dead-simple to use editor with
       | "traditional" key bindings (e.g. ctrl-s to save), was often
       | installed by default on random cheap servers, and provided
       | working syntax highlighting out of the box.
        
         | xscott wrote:
         | Jed's author (John E Davis) was also super friendly. Way back
         | when, I was connecting to the university's terminal servers
         | using a dumb terminal. My terminal was unusual in that it had
         | 64 different colors, and this was the kind of thing you
         | couldn't easily get at by fixing your termcap entry. I sent an
         | email to him, and a day or two later, he added capabilities
         | specifically for my terminal. After that, I had very colorful
         | source code for the rest of my schooling. I only stopped using
         | jed after I graduated when I went to work for a Windows (Visual
         | C++) shop.
        
       | sea6ear wrote:
       | I had a brief flirtation with THE (The Hessling Editor) when I
       | was in college.
       | 
       | It was programmable in Rexx. I found it fascinating but
       | ultimately moved on to Vim and Emacs as my daily drivers.
        
       | tankfeeder wrote:
       | dte
        
       | PAPPPmAc wrote:
       | I've been really taken with Micro for a couple years.
       | 
       | I have the classic GUI-style control key combinations
       | (^Z,X,C,V,F, etc.) so deeply in my fingers that I inevitably try
       | to use them everywhere, appropriate or not, and Micro does the
       | right thing with them. Super intuitive (Ctrl+Arrows to jump
       | words) and/or mnemonic (Ctrl+T for Tab) for the usual text-editor
       | features. A good selection of power feature like Sublime-ish
       | multiple cursors and a scriptable command line. Mouse integration
       | just works in X. Hooks xclip or xsel to integrate with the system
       | clipboard. Etc.
       | 
       | And (being written in go), it's super easy to make static
       | binaries and/or cross-compile to drop on machines which are
       | fucked or you have limited access to or the like. Eg. if you need
       | an editor on some random embedded ARM Linux box, you can'env
       | GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm CGO_ENABLED=0 make' and a few seconds later
       | you have a binary to drop there.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | CalChris wrote:
       | _TECO_ should be on that list. But I don 't know that there are
       | any modern implementations. It dates to 1962 and was DEC
       | specific.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)
        
       | drran wrote:
       | Turbo - editor made using TurboVision, with support for Unicode:
       | https://github.com/magiblot/turbo
        
         | qbasic_forever wrote:
         | It's sad no one really uses block characters anymore in text
         | UIs. :(
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | "!Zap" is not a terminal editor at all, it's a GUI text editor
       | for RISC OS.
        
         | Animats wrote:
         | Troff is not a terminal editor, either. It's a document markup
         | language, like Tex. It belongs to the family
         | Runoff->nroff->troff->ditroff, and lives on as the horror in
         | which UNIX manual pages are written.
        
           | greenyoda wrote:
           | I still remember using troff to create typeset output on a
           | C/A/T phototypesetter hooked up to a PDP/11 running Version 7
           | Unix in the early 1980s. This article has a description of
           | how that phototypesetter worked:
           | https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/index.html
        
           | baruchel wrote:
           | Still using Troff as my everyday text formatting software.
           | Heirloom Troff works with UTF8 encoding, OTF fonts, Knuth's
           | breaking line algorithm, etc. It does what I want without
           | deciding by itself, has much better support for
           | microtypography then LaTeX, etc.
        
         | celeritascelery wrote:
         | Same with Xi, it is a GUI editor.
        
           | mbStavola wrote:
           | There are various Xi frontend implementations[1], some of
           | which are entirely terminal based like xi-term[2]. Xi
           | _itself_ does not implement any UI, but there is an example
           | implementation in Xi-Mac[3].
           | 
           | [1]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor#frontends [2]:
           | https://github.com/xi-frontend/xi-term [3]:
           | https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-mac
        
         | danellis wrote:
         | That said, it's surprising to see Zap on a list without
         | StrongEd.
        
       | znpy wrote:
       | I'm surprised I couldn't find mg on the list.
       | 
       | It's like a micro-version of emacs. Imagine an editor just to fit
       | your muscular memory, but without all the elisp and stuff. Just
       | for those quick edits.
        
       | dsevil wrote:
       | joe needs to be on that list. probably.
       | 
       | https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
        
         | danellis wrote:
         | Absolutely. joe has been my to-go terminal editor for over 20
         | years.
        
           | lewiscollard wrote:
           | Joe gang! I also started using it about 20 years ago because,
           | for whatever reason, that was the editor that was there and
           | the editor I heard about, and then I never stopped.
        
         | acheron wrote:
         | I used to use Joe all the time too. Eventually for work I was
         | working on a lot of systems where I couldn't easily install it
         | so I moved away from it, but it was a good one.
        
       | stonefish wrote:
       | Gentoo linux has a list of packages that it deems to be
       | acceptable terminal editors.
       | https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/virtual/edito...
        
       | donio wrote:
       | One of these is not like the others.
        
         | throwawaybutwhy wrote:
         | No idea why this is downvoted, maybe it's a Friday thing.
         | Calling troff an editor is unwarranted.
         | 
         | XEDIT, mcedit, ISPF's editor could be added to the list.
        
       | forgotpwd16 wrote:
       | A similar list is on Wikipedia:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors#Text_user...
        
       | trwired wrote:
       | I'd love to use a terminal editor with Sublime-like keyboard
       | scheme. In fact if Sublime HQ started selling a terminal version
       | of Sublime Text, I'd buy it.
        
         | asivokon wrote:
         | Take a look at https://github.com/slap-editor/slap
        
       | underscore_ku wrote:
       | micro > nano
        
         | Droobfest wrote:
         | I really wish micro was the default editor on Linux, nano's
         | hotkeys are completely bonkers.
        
       | rejectedandsad wrote:
       | Are there any terminal editors that support default tree views?
       | I'm aware of most having them as separate extensions like
       | NERDTree
        
         | teitoklien wrote:
         | Vim does it , with netrw (ships with vim natively) , just press
         | the i key a few times to change netrw's layout to tree view
         | 
         | Just change netrw's config file to default to the tree view and
         | then add a line in your vim to open netrw by default in a
         | visual split for your project's root directory.
        
       | erk__ wrote:
       | There is also ee/aee/xee which is by default installed on FreeBSD
       | as a alternative to vi which does not have mode switching.
        
       | NmAmDa wrote:
       | This reminds me of last year when I got over with vim and I knew
       | about micro. Since that I lived with " alias vim='micro' " into
       | my zsh config. It is not that famous and cannot be customized a
       | lot like vim but I always hated going between modes.
        
       | mftrhu wrote:
       | > troff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff
       | 
       | ... why is _troff_ on a list of terminal _editors?_ It can format
       | text for the terminal, sure - and it 's quite versatile, as I
       | discovered playing around with it - but it's as much of an editor
       | as LaTeX or markdown.
       | 
       | That said, if I used to find new editors fascinating -
       | http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl - these days I just
       | can't imagine leaving Emacs and my own customizations behind.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-06-12 23:01 UTC)