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masinick
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Joined: 03 Apr 2024
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Location: Concord, NH
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 Posted: Thu May 13, 2024 6:35 pm Post subject: Writing an article about text editors |
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| I'm working on an article about text editors. I might be integrating some of the comments I've made about various editors. In essence, I'll start with a survey of common editors, then I'll touch on some of the features and which editors might be appropriate for particular tasks.
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crouse
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masinick
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 12:57 am Post subject: I'd be glad to include those (and more) |
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| crouse wrote: |  Thanks masinick 
Don't forget Bluefish 
A list of editors:
VI
Emacs
nano
pico
YuDit
bluefish
quanta
Kedit (builtin toKDE)
Kate (formerly known as Kwrite)
Gedit
KhexEdit
more ????? |
Perhaps this note would be a good place to mention editors that LUG members use and would like to see mentioned in an article. If I've overlooked any editors, I can add them to the list. Any Linux editor that can be installed is either in the Debian tree or I can build it from source, so I have access to an incredible number of editors.
Believe it or not, there's a LOT more than just text editors, too. You scratched the surface, hinting of hex editors. There are readable text editors, binary hex editors, message catalog editors, image map editors, manual page editors, then there's the whole category of editing tools that breaks things wide open - word processors and office suites. I will be confining this article to a discussion of text editors, otherwise it'll take too long to research and write the article.
If there's interest, though, I could end up writing a series of articles, over time, about a variety of topics.
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Stuka
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Location: Houston, TX
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 3:01 am Post subject: |
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| That list skips over Vim, which IMO is the best general-purpose editor out there - it has nice features for text, more programming/markup languages than you can shake a stick at, and great support for handling external programs (which enable it to act as a hex editor, for example). Sure, you've got vi, but the difference between the two is incalculable.
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masinick
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Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 3:16 am Post subject: Fear not, Vi/Vim/Gvim/Elvis will be discussed |
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| Stuka wrote: | | That list skips over Vim, which IMO is the best general-purpose editor out there - it has nice features for text, more programming/markup languages than you can shake a stick at, and great support for handling external programs (which enable it to act as a hex editor, for example). Sure, you've got vi, but the difference between the two is incalculable. |
The first GNU/Linux software I used, Slackware 2.3, which I installed in 1995, linked the Elvis command line text editor and used it in compatibility mode as vi. I believe that Slackware may still do that, though Vim is also available.
Vim is certainly a very feature rich, yet reasonably sized editor, and no good text editor review should go without significant mention of Vim, but also of its lineage and heritage. I plan to write about Vim/Gvim, and I also plan to mention our forum article, which has a very nice tutorial about Vim.
I'll be mentioning many text editors, but I plan to highlight both Emacs and Vim. They attract the lion's share of attention. You bring out a very good point that there is a rather large difference between the original, fast, but archaic implementation of vi and the very modern, current implementation of Vim. Emacs is similarly very improved from its humble origins.
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maillion
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masinick
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 9:10 pm Post subject: Ironically enough, Vile has Emacs in it! |
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| maillion wrote: | I haven't mentioned it to anyone, but the one whose name best describes my opinion of VI is called 'vile'...  |
LOL! I hear you. People either love or loathe vi, there's not many who feel neutral about it. Vi is a very powerful editor, but it is also has a very unusual interface. Only other programs that have been written out of a Vi lineage have a similar interface.
Vile is an editor that has a Vi finger feel, that is, it is a modal editor and it responds to commands, such as h j k l to move left a character, down a line, up a line, or right a character. (Actually, that's what happens when you press ONLY the keys h j k or l when you're in command mode. Each of those cursor movement keys can have a modifier associated with them). The combination of those modifiers and the presence of those keys right in the home typing row makes vi a favorite of fast touch typists.
But here's what's interesting: beneath the covers, the engine that implements Vile was taken from a version of MicroEmacs! How's THAT for an irony!
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lynch
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 9:33 pm Post subject: |
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I use vi to edit system/config files and kwrite when I need to copy/paste info as text. I also use kwrite for general composition.
lynch
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maillion
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 9:51 pm Post subject: Re: Ironically enough, Vile has Emacs in it! |
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| masinick wrote: | | maillion wrote: | | I haven't mentioned it to anyone, but the one whose name best describes my opinion of VI is called 'vile'... |
LOL! I hear you. People either love or loathe vi, there's not many who feel neutral about it. Vi is a very powerful editor, but it is also has a very unusual interface. Only other programs that have been written out of a Vi lineage have a similar interface.
Vile is an editor that has a Vi finger feel, that is, it is a modal editor and it responds to commands, such as h j k l to move left a character, down a line, up a line, or right a character. (Actually, that's what happens when you press ONLY the keys h j k or l when you're in command mode. Each of those cursor movement keys can have a modifier associated with them). The combination of those modifiers and the presence of those keys right in the home typing row makes vi a favorite of fast touch typists.
But here's what's interesting: beneath the covers, the engine that implements Vile was taken from a version of MicroEmacs! How's THAT for an irony! |
(The only thing that I have against VI, really is that it reminds me too much of a line editor, and I really hate line editors! 
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masinick
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| Posted: Fri May 14, 2024 10:39 pm Post subject: Re: Ironically enough, Vile has Emacs in it! |
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[quote="maillion"] | masinick wrote: |
LOL! I hear you. People either love or loathe vi, there's not many who feel neutral about it. Vi is a very powerful editor, but it is also has a very unusual interface. Only other programs that have been written out of a Vi lineage have a similar interface.
(The only thing that I have against VI, really is that it reminds me too much of a line editor, and I really hate line editors! |
I grew up on line editors. The first editor I ever used was embedded into Dartmouth Basic, which I used on a Hewlett Packard minicomputer connected to an ASR 33 teletype! I *HAD* to use a line editor.
Later, I used various line editors on UNIVAC mainframe systems, minicomputers, and the first microcomputers (now called PCs) as I was attending college in the 1970s.
In 1979, I went to General Motors and got my hands on the first true full screen editor. (I had used editors that would display on a screen in college, but they really weren't full screen editors). I got experience with TSO and ISPF on IBM mainframe systems.
That experience really didn't satisfy me, so I sought to get into work that utilized those microcomputers that I enjoyed so much at the end of my college days. (Mind you, those systems did NOT have MS/DOS or any operating system on them, simply a BASIC interpreter hooked to a BIOS interface, but they were fun to use).
I got my hands on UNIX systems in 1982. I had an extremely brief introduction to a UNIX system in 1978 and 1979 at Michigan Tech, but I really didn't get to use it much at all. But in 1982, I got a chance, while working at General Motors, to assess three tier computing for the first time. My job was to survey the systems available and brainstorm for ways to use PCs, minicomputers, and mainframe systems to collaborate, share data, and offload interactive mainframe activities.
At that time, MS/DOS was really simple; it was nowhere near as rich in features as UNIX systems, but it did have some nice usable applications. UNIX was far more powerful, but clearly catered to geeks.
I became interested in compilers, text editors, and programming interfaces that were designed to make computers easier to use. Because of job responsibilities, it seems I can't stay with such things, but my ideal job would be to work with such interfaces all the time.
When I first used Vi in 1982, I thought it was a bit overly complicated, especially after using IBM's ISPF, but before long I began to appreciate it. Vi certainly was a lot easier to deal with than ed, the original UNIX text editor.
About the same time, on another job in 1982 at GM, I got my first exposure to MULTICS and MULTICS Emacs while working on Hourly Personnel Systems at GM. One application used a relational database on a MULTICS system. The application was unusual in that day and age and extremely powerful. The hardware was barely able to handle the tasks, and Emacs was nowhere near as fast as it is today, but it gave me an appreciation of its power.
Around 1987, I got another chance to use GNU Emacs software for the first time on a Digital ULTRIX system, and that's when I really became interested in Emacs.
I'd agree that both of them are unusual compared to nearly anything else, yet I'd stack their power and flexibility up against just about any editing tool. Ease of use? They are definitely NOT the easiest. Most powerful? Both are right up there at the top.
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maillion
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masinick
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| Posted: Wed May 19, 2024 11:59 pm Post subject: If you're used to edlin as a line editor... |
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| maillion wrote: | | masinick wrote: | | I grew up on line editors. The first editor I ever used was embedded into Dartmouth Basic, which I used on a Hewlett Packard minicomputer connected to an ASR 33 teletype! I *HAD* to use a line editor. |
Me, too, but different machines. I used various BASIC interpreters at first, then EDLIN in MSDOS, and when I took BASIC programming in college, we used a mainframe that had an unnamed line editor. I got so very tired of them, that anything that looked or acted similarly, upset me...  |
Edlin has to be one of the worst line editors ever designed. Ed, on the other hand, at least has a logical, consistent design. Edlin is the one editor that I never really mastered. I could get by in it and that is about it. Ed is pretty simple. Starting out, you're in edit mode. To enter text, you type in a on a line by itself and press Enter. To finish entering text, you type in a period (.) on a line by itself and press Enter.
Vi grew out of ed and ex. I think some of the other articles go into great depth on this, and recent articles about Bill Joy and his creations also talk about how Vi came into being, and even about vi versus Vi, about qed, the editor that Ken Thompson worked with before ed, and all kinds of other stuff. I can mention such stuff, but I'll only really get into it if someone specifically expresses an interest.
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nukes
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maillion
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| Posted: Thu May 20, 2024 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Edlin has to be one of the worst line editors ever designed. Ed, on the other hand, at least has a logical, consistent design. Edlin is the one editor that I never really mastered. I could get by in it and that is about it. Ed is pretty simple. Starting out, you're in edit mode. To enter text, you type in a on a line by itself and press Enter. To finish entering text, you type in a period (.) on a line by itself and press Enter. |
Yeah, I used edlin only as much as I had to, and as little as I could get away with.  I think the fullscreen DOS editor finally came with ver. 3, but I'm not sure. I did have one VI type editor that I liked, it was called TEd (Tiny Editor). It was entirely in machine code, and took up a whopping 1,000 bytes (Note: I did not leave out the K in front of bytes)! It was quick!
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nukes
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| Posted: Thu May 20, 2024 1:42 pm Post subject: |
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you mean edit.com? I don't recall having it in DOS 4.0.
I think it was DOS 5. Maybe 6.
I liked doing stuff in machine code in those days, I don't find it too practical now as you want code to be portable and end up writing C fallbacks anyway. I never got to grips of sharing the computer when one of my programs was running either. I can do it in C, but these fancy operating systems confuse me when you're doing assembly.
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