(Graphical) IDE’s are great for development, but they’re slow to start and heavy to run. Sometimes you just want to take a quick look at an xml or dockerfile and you don’t want to spin up the whole IDE for that.
I’ve recently rediscovered notepad++ for that (on windows), what’s your prefered easy-acces-tekst-editor?
Helix. Instant startup. Minimal configuration required. Has all of the killer features I want from an IDE anyway.
EDIT: I assumed people would just research this anyway, but a more complete list of features I enjoy from Helix:
- very responsive
- modal editing
- declarative configuration file format (TOML, not Lua)
- language server protocol
- debug adapter protocol
- written in Rust so I am more likely to be able to submit a PR if I need to
Some cons (all known issues on github):
- no plugin API yet
- inline LSP diagnostics are overly intrusive and can overlap your code
- cold-starts the LSP when you start the editor, so you might need to wait for symbol queries in a large project
Kate, though it gets a bit IDE like.
I wouldn’t normally point out a spelling mistake but… Why did you spell text like that?
In some languages tekst is their native word for text. OP seems to at very least know dutch, where that seems to be the case.
Lol yeah, it’s a dutchism 😆
That sounds like the most likely explanation
Emacs. But honestly, I have no idea what I am doing.
I’d call that an IDE, but also one that makes using a non-IDE editor superfluous.
As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.
The biggest irony is it’s often told by vim fanboys, who apparently don’t realize a very comprehensive emulator of vim it is one of the editors Emacs offers. But mostly it seems to be told by people who don’t even know what Emacs is, they just know they’re meant to disapprove of it.
Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.
Yeah, I’d call Emac and Vim both IDE’s. They’re definitely not “just” text editors.
Vim can have some IDE-like qualities, if you bolt enough plugins in to it, but by default it affords buttinx text in a file and manipulating it.
I woudn’t classify it as an ide though.
Neovim can can certainly be an IDE, but its complexity comes from having a lot of features to rapidly edit text. d5d deletes 5 lines, vwwy selects two words and yanks them, gg returns to the beginning of the file, etc. It’ll maybe do some code highlighting out of the box but its featureset is about never needing to touch a mouse or leave home row.
It’s about like notepad++ on Windows in that it’s very good for quick edits of a file or otherwise manipulating plaintext but it isn’t good out of the box for actual writing meant to be read by other human beings.
Vim if I’m on Linux, notepad++ if I’m on windows. Though I will use VSCode in both OS if want to make a lot of changes and run the file.
Kate on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows.
Also, Kate on Windows (it’s really good)
Didn’t know there’s Kate for windows, nice
HelixandCode - OSSsometimes (Code - OSSis an open source vscode distribution)You mean vscodium? VS Code is not OSS…
https://stackoverflow.com/a/58642895/18682712
I edited my comment to clarify it.
vim on any *nix box, Notepad++ when forced to use Windows.
Vim is cross platform, just in case you don’t know
Hadn’t looked into that for a long time, will try. I think the biggest hurdle for me might be native Windows terminals still being shit.
Yeah absolutely. I only use the graphical version (gvim) on Windows.
It’s the best solution for editing huge text files in Windows. The other text editors slow to a crawl with big files, but gvim has no problem.
Vim for everything
Geany or (with a lot of reconfiguration) Kate.
Geany is built upon the same text edit control as Notepad++.
Same for me, I even use it on Mac OS X too (which somehow still doesn’t ship with a basic text editor).
Neovim for most things. At work I use VSCode for Java stuff
This is going to be a boring answer but I use neovim. I do use it as my ide as well but it’s so fast and lightweight that when I need to edit a random config file or something, I just start another instance of it.
My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.
That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)
Helix, Lapce, and/or VSCodium
Kate since VSCode doesn’t render correctly on my rig anymore…
I had the problem a week or so ago. I deleted my settings file and it started working again.
