[Jimmers]

...because no OS forum is complete without one.

And I'm for vi, forever.

[nv_dv]

u right Vi just Great

[Blazkowicz]

both are user hostile nightmares but if I were to spend weeks to learn one of them, I'd go with vi because of the minimalism and I'd rather type :a2pm! rather than ctrl-x ctrl-y ctrl-ù or whatever. but maybe vi (or both) is unsuitable for non QWERTY layout (french AZERTY here).
and the windows console sucks hard compared to the 50 year old xterm.. so, would be the hassle of learning vi worthwile?
(yes, windoze-only user here, why would I use linux if I had to reboot under windoze to play games)

edit.com would be my vote , it has the ctrl-ins/shit-ins/shift-del way of copy pasting I can't live without, even has a text GUI and mouse support (though I don't use the mouse), it gets unix formatted text right whereas notepad put everything on the same line (quake 3 config files.. damn). too bad it's not there under unix

[BRiT]

Emacs. There's nothing it can not do.

[Chalnoth]

Aye, emacs all the way. The only reason I can think of for people to ever use VI would be just because they learned it first. From what I've been able to tell, emacs offers so much more, and is quite a bit more user-friendly to the beginner. At the very least, the majority of commands are accessible through the menu interface in the X version of emacs, whereas with VI there's no hint at all to the beginner as to how to even begin to edit a file.

[Martin Eddy]

I'm going to sound like a complete noob here but, what the hell are you guys talking about?

What's an emac or vi or nano or pico?

[arjan de lumens]

Emacs, vi, pico and nano are text editors, very commonly available on Unix/Linux systems. They represent some rather different philosophies as to how text editors should work (except that nano is basically a clone of pico), none of which will feel familiar if you haven't actually used these particular editors before.

Personally I prefer nedit.

[Blazkowicz]

yes, nedit is good, like a notepad or edit.com but with line numbers, syntax highlighting and some other stuff. and I can select text with the keyboard like in windoze without learning cryptic commands. best simple editor and better than graphical emacs for simple, normal use .

great one is Jedit, it's slow to launch for an editor as it's relatively big and written in Java, but it served me well for student coding : a lot of features while remaining simple to use, looks the same whatever the OS (the installer is the very same one!) and looks quite good, customisable interface (you dock things were you want), integrated file browser with favorites, and with plugins you get tabs, ftp support, integrated console (good for compiling and checking errors), and when you launch it again you find all your open files, back to work like nothing has moved.
It was the same experience whether I'd work at uni on the old X terminals, or at home under windows on the same remote files (with my stupids little programs running under putty instead of xterm), I recommend it much!

http://www.jedit.org/

[Ragemare]

Tbh I use nano more than any of those because I'm lazy and it's simple, but I voted Emacs because it does a lot more. I'd rather use an editor like Kate or Scite though.

Never used Vim, I'll give it a look though.

[Tim Murray]

emacs. I can't imagine using vi.

[3dcgi]

Originally Posted by arjan de lumens

Personally I prefer nedit.

Seconded. Although I like UltraEdit on Windows the best. Someday they will make a Linux version.

[Xenus]

gah emacs is annoying and slow. I prefer pico.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Xenus

gah emacs is annoying and slow. I prefer pico.

Slow? How?

[Xenus]

It may just be the way the college computers are set up but it takes forever to initalize and is sometimes hangs when your trying to do some editing.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Xenus

It may just be the way the college computers are set up but it takes forever to initalize and is sometimes hangs when your trying to do some editing.

That doesn't sound right at all. On my computer, Emacs loads in about 1-2 seconds from within Cygwin (a Linux emulator for Windows), so loading shouldn't be an issue.

It really sounds to me like you're loading emacs up remotely on those computers. That's the only thing that should ever cause it to hang. In which case, you should blame how the college computers are set up, not emacs. Though for remote editing, I typically load emacs in a terminal window for performance reasons (If X is running, you can run emacs in a terminal window with the -nw command line switch).

[Xenus]

Yeah there slow so the only time I use them is when I need help with coding otherwords I just ssh in and do it that way as it almost seems to load faster and I don't have to leave the dorm room.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Xenus

Yeah there slow so the only time I use them is when I need help with coding otherwords I just ssh in and do it that way as it almost seems to load faster and I don't have to leave the dorm room.

Yeah, if it almost seems to load faster to SSH in, then the campus computers must just be remote terminals.

If the responsiveness bothers you, you could always download Cygwin to get basic Linux functionality in Windows, then use rsync to keep the files on your home PC and at school identical (rsync only copies files which have changed, which improves the speed of uploads/downloads, obviously...but you should tell it to use SSH for security reasons...it's a command line option which I don't recall offhand, check the man page).

[Xenus]

I just use x-win32 as the unversity gives it to us for free and ssh in like that nice and simple. I only lose the gui but that isn't a problem as command line for emacs is emacs.

[Blazkowicz]

my unix session at uni was accessible by ftp from anywhere.
in that case, best way to remotely edit files is to use an editor on the local machine that supports remote files.

[Chalnoth]

Yeah, that's a good way to do it. The only thing you want to be careful about when doing that is to use secure FTP (ex. FTP through SSH), as normal FTP does not encrypt the password during transmission, and if you protect any other data with the same username/password, well, that could be a bad thing.

[darkblu]

v. i.

as for the rest of you, darn infidels, repent while you still can.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by arjan de lumens

Personally I prefer nedit.

Yes.

Can't say I use linux that often (especially now I'm out of university) but I could never get to feel comfortable in xemacs (the editor the uni insisted everyone use). Not sure how it compares to normal emacs, but I found it a horrendous program to use. Had it crash 3 different ways the first time I sat down with it. Drove the lab supervisors utterly bonkers. The default configuration was to have the print button right next to the save button; Of course, this is linux, so click print and it appears nothing has happened.... Not to mention the menus.. Things like that.

I'm sure it's a fantastic program, it just wasn't for me. I guess I felt unproductive when using it.

Then I discovered nedit. The ability to run shell commands using the number pad enter key, combined with the very simple interface and excellent syntax highlighting was all I needed in one small window. Very useful little tool.

[fearsomepirate]

Just as a text editor, VI kicks a world of ass. I love never having to take my fingers off the home row. But if we're allowing the GUI of Xemacs to be considered, well, VI doesn't have any native macros (that I'm aware of) for generating bibtex files.

[Phil]

It's VI for me as well. Any day of the week.

[Florin]

ed of course. Duh.