Talk In Code

As a long-time Windows user, there was always something which confused me when it came to learning my trade on Linux based systems – the sheer amount of choice in apps on offer to fulfill a single task. Which leads me on to the next thing – the nigh-on-religious wars which have erupted around these apps.

Case in point: text editors. When I first went to edit a file in a pure Linux text console, I thought I would try out vi. When I found my head spinning after just a few minutes of trying to edit one line of a config file, I gave up and tried emacs. When I got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff bolted into the text editor, I thought that I would go for the Linux text mode equivalent of Notepad, nano. I edited the file and moved onto the next thing I had to do.

But it really got me thinking. There is always a place for an alternative application in a given area – vi and emacs both do the same thing (edit plain text) but offer 2 very different ways of doing this, and both are highly configurable and so on and so forth. But what this doesn’t explain is the vitriolic debate which springs up around the users of each.

You don’t see this on other platforms – Windows users typically have to put up with Notepad until they discover something like Notepad++ and OS X users have Textmate (which seems to be very popular on that platform). However, you don’t get the users of UltraEdit insulting the entire families of those who use Notepad++. You don’t get arguments which have raged for 20+ years. In short, its all a bit more civilized.

So I get to my point – out of all these text editors on Linux, which one do you use and why? Functionality? The way the app looks? The price (or lack of it)?