Geek squad powers, activate!

[serene]

I know I'm probably looking to start a religious war on my own journal, but help me out here, folks:

Which text editor would you recommend for me to use on the Ubuntu machine? I have been using TextPad on Windows, and I really like the syntax highlighting, global searches, and workspace functionality. Can you point me toward a text editor you really like, please?

Thank you!

Comments

[baerana.livejournal.com]

maybe gvim?

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I'll check it out; thanks!

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I love gvim, but it has a steep learning curve. Emacs likewise. Kate and Jedit are both well worth a look.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

also http://geany.uvena.de/

this is an interest of mine, so if you say what you don't like about any of them i'll hunt more up :)

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Thank you; I will do that. Some more info: I plan to end up using gnus. I don't mind a steep learning curve. I want something as configurable as I can get it. A workspace functionality (not sure how common that is -- basically, it means I can save a bunch of documents as a group, and later open the group and get the most recent saved version of each document) is essential to my happiness. I'll say more as I try some of the recommendations I've gotten. I appreciate the help!

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

i think eclipse has good workspace functionality, but it's more an ide than an editor. emacs doubtless has it in there somewhere :) i prefer the 'feel' of vim, but emacs is a way of life. jedit is the other insanely customisable editor, outside of the big two.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

(also, just because you're going to use gnus is not a good enough reason to use emacs above everything else, though it is a point in emacs's favour)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

and what you call workspaces are more commonly known as projects in the linux world, which should help in googling

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

You are an extremely helpful person. Thank you. More tomorrow, I'm sure. Please let me know when you're tired of playing mentor. :-)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

glad to help :) like i said, it's a particular interest of mine

[emperor]

emacs :-)

[surelars.livejournal.com]

Well - first thing you do is subscribe to alt.religion.emacs

Seriously, I've been an Emacs person since the mid-80's, and I still find it the best for sheer power, ability to make it do just the things I want to, and in particular that it focuses on actual editing - all the little things you do when editing.

For simple things I get along with gedit and the like fine, though. And I still edit config files and such in vi.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Can you explain to me why one would use more than one text editor? Just curious.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

downloading emacs was simple. I'll play with it, just to get a baseline. Again, thanks.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I've downloaded it, and am going through the tutorial now. I already like it just sheerly for the keyboard-based navigation. I learned word processing back before there were mouses (mice?), and I really like keeping my hands on the keyboard and not having to use the mouse.

It's maybe gonna be weird, though, to have some mouse-based and some keyboard-based applications I use a lot. We'll see how it goes. I think I'm trainable. :-)

[ptor.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Here's what little I know from my own experience...

I use KDE's kedit for simple GUI text editing. I use kate if I want to do block indenting.

I'm a casual user of vi. Ugly, but it's everywhere and I don't have to grab for a mouse.

I never learned emacs.

I'm unfamiliar with what would be good for multi-document projects. Let me know what you learn!

[surelars.livejournal.com]

No.

I can explain why I do it. For big editing jobs, anything but emacs drive me nuts. But for small things I sometime find simple comforting, especially in a GUI type environment; it somehow blends in easier with cut'n'pasting things back and forth and making little notes.

As for config files, I tend to edit those while navigating around in a shell window, and from there fire up vi. Why? Habit - a habit formed 25 years ago and hard to break. Also, the vi editing commands seem to be by now hardwired in my neurons, just the way emacs commands are.

[hel]

I like Kate, tho it's a KDE thing, but probably works on gnome. I find it very familiar to textpad.

[inferno0069.livejournal.com]

I'm a (g)vim fan (Ubuntu's package is probably called vim-gnome). I like using commands that jump N words, or affect the whole paragraph, and I like that it has an undo history that doesn't forget things if you undo and then start typing (it's like a tree, not a line).

I sometimes go with jedit. If you go with emacs, you may want to check to be sure it's adding an end-of-line character at the end of the last line. Eclipse is even worse about that.