Lesser Known Terminal Editors | Hacker News Reader

Lesser Known Terminal Editors

codeberg.org

89 pointsFudgel58 comments

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.

Micro is awesome! My only gripe is that the default color scheme doesn't respect your terminal's settings, but that is quickly remedied with `set colorscheme simple` (cmc-16 also works).

I waited for micro for twenty years. Hobbled with nano+config files, then ne, tolerable but not great. If it only had a menu like turbovision, I’d absolutely love it.

> 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.

Turbo - editor made using TurboVision, with support for Unicode: https://github.com/magiblot/turbo

It's sad no one really uses block characters anymore in text UIs. :(

finalcut (modern C++ library for TUI with good support for mouse) uses block characters in TUI.

[0]: https://github.com/gansm/finalcut

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)

https://almy.us/teco.html

i remember playing with this on a Mac in the last few years.

joe needs to be on that list. probably.

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

As someone who quite likes joe (especially its integrated shell - quite appealing to an acme user), may I ask ...

Why oh why doesn't it implement proper soft line wrapping???

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.

Nah. This is a list of lesser known editors. Who doesn't love joe?

Absolutely. joe has been my to-go terminal editor for over 20 years.

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.

I started using Joe because I had been using... Lordy, Wordstar. For years.

Why the heck is ed on the list? It’s probably included in every *nix distro ever made. After all it is THE standard editor. :)

There are actually Linux distributions that don't include it (e.g. Debian), even though it's required by POSIX.

Why is it still required?

It's easily scripted. Original-format diff output is an ed script.

I was just wondering the same thing. Like, I get that ed isn't exactly a household name when it comes to software generally, but in the very specific world of terminal emulators it's practically royalty.

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.

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.

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.

Take a look at https://github.com/slap-editor/slap

Last commit December 2016, needs NodeJS 6.x

Micro is close, with fewer esoteric features.

I've always wondered if there was an editor like QEDIT on MSDOS, but remade for linux. qedit was miles better than nano.

Micro is the new hotness.

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...

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.

A similar list is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors#Text_user...

"!Zap" is not a terminal editor at all, it's a GUI text editor for RISC OS.

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.

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

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.

Same with Xi, it is a GUI editor.

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

That said, it's surprising to see Zap on a list without StrongEd.

I would add Emacs style editors to the list:

- zile - mg - qemacs

I use zile almost daily for small edits.

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.)

Wow. I didn't even know this mg existed and see it's installed already on Catalina. I love discovering new stuff like this!

Alongside the well-known ones, and Zile, another GNU text editor is Moe.

zile is great, it's only major problem being lack of Unicode support

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.

micro > nano

I really wish micro was the default editor on Linux, nano's hotkeys are completely bonkers.

alias nano="micro"

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.

I've been using THE (The Hessling Editor) steadily since 2012 for work and for personal projects. Its ability to incorporate Rexx makes it easy to customize the editor as well as facilitate use with other useful programs such as Freeplane, or launch and track Microsoft Office work.

Vim and Emacs are part of standard toolsets in a wider base of organizations, so if you've bounced around, they would be more useful. Also, THE doesn't handle unicode very well, so that presents a decreasing window for application as unicode becomes more wide spread.

Meanwhile, The Hessling Editor, continues to be downloaded from SourceForge and has active forums.

I used setedit some few decades ago.

http://setedit.sourceforge.net/

There is also ee/aee/xee which is by default installed on FreeBSD as a alternative to vi which does not have mode switching.

Are there any terminal editors that support default tree views? I'm aware of most having them as separate extensions like NERDTree

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.

One of these is not like the others.

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.

dte

Probably ought to be called 'terminal-based editors'. Though I suppose you could edit a terminal('s source code) with one of these. </pedantry>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com