What's your preferred text editor?

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Opensource.com

The text editor is a workhorse for many people working in tech.

A few of the most popular options out there today are tried-and-true text editors like vi, Emacs, and gedit. And, a new text editor on the scene that's picking up traction is Atom. All four are open source, so you can get involved in the project and help improve it!

Fun facts

Vi is pronounced (vee - eye) and comes pre-installed on most Linux operating systems. An improved version is Vim, which you can learn while playing a game at VIM-adventures.com.

Emacs is a family of text editors. GNU Emacs was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project.

gedit is the default text editor for the GNOME desktop environment.

Atom is created by the folks at GitHub. If you use the chat platform Slack, you can join Atom there.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
1017 votes tallied
Atom
11% (110 votes)
vi
46% (467 votes)
Emacs
14% (142 votes)
gedit
13% (130 votes)
Other (tell us in the comments)
17% (168 votes)

Results

Comments

50 Comments

Kate is my favourite text editor.

Kate for me, too.

I would say Sublime Text, for the time being Atom seems a bit sluggish for my workflow :/

It's gotta run in a console, so...nano.

Notepad++ is what i use the most.

For shell based it's nano, for gui based its sublime text

JOE is the one I use most, in WordStar mode. I'm pretty sure that dates me, since Wordstar was the first word processor I learned. Kedit was my favorite GUI based editor. Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared. I keep one copy of Slackware 12.2 running just so I can still use it occasionally.

In my opinion, VI is an antique modal editor that should have been abandoned decades ago. Emacs, on the other hand, is the poster child for bloat and feature creep. It should never have been allowed to enter the ecosystem.

Joe and Scite.

Joe is basic and does what it does!!

I use Sublime Text Editor

LaTeX

I love Geany.

I like geany too for simple edits/notetaking available in any GUI.

geany too

For Linux it's Kwrite.
For Windows it's PSPad.

KATE & on Console "mcedit" is my Favorite.

Ha! I was about to post exactly the same.

Kate is excellent an I've been using mc/mcedit for so long thar I should have a masters on it already :)

I also use vi/vim ocasionally if mc is not installed, or nano if I don't have a choice.

Geany, its a decent compiler, and text editor.
then Vim for sshing.

Same exact thing here for geany on a GUI, and vim for the command-line (alias vi='/usr/bin/vim')

Kate is Great!

kate is my favourite

i use Jetbrains IDE for all purpose.
Pretty slick.

When I'm commanding the terminal, I use vi.
When I'm in a GUI, I use scite.

mousepad

KDE Kate is my favourite text editor. How could you miss it from the poll? And if I need to use text mode then I use GNU Emacs.

I assume vi=vim. I tried really hard to like Emacs (and Org-mode), but I always fall back to Vim.

Kate

nano

Both on linux and win, I use Sublime Text.

Another happy user of jstar, Joe's-Own-Editor in WordStar mode.

My favorite text editor is LaTeX, of course!

Since when is LaTeX an editor? I though it was a markup language?

That said, if you want to write LaTeX without the initial learning curve, I recommend LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

Kate (but I actually spend most of my time in ActiveState Komodo).

Geany for GUI, nano for terminal :-)

vim/sublime/leafpad/ICEedit it depends on what I am doing. VIM is great when I am working in SSH. I make sure I use it enough that my skills continue to improve with it. SUBLIME text is great with multiple cursors and I believe it will make me more productive over time and Atom takes way to long to start up to be useful. LEAFPAD for a scratchpad when I take notes, or someplace to drop spinets of code or URLs. ICEeditor is web based and nice for editing code on a web server and not having to worry about making sure my permissions are correct. Since any code edits are done as the user the webserver runs as.

I'm a huge fan of Atom. Seriously, it's my favorite piece of software!

I selected vi, but only because vim wasn't listed.

At the command line, I use vi pretty exclusively, except when it makes more sense to just echo "words" >> textfile.txt. But I'm no vi guru, and I end up using gedit more than I should for text on the desktop.

I think my use of gedit a symptom of bad posture. Slouched so far back in your chair you can only reach your mouse? Keyboard-driven editors might not be your best bet.

I've been using Sublime Text for a few years now, especially wonderful with Emmet.io

ne, the nice editor: http://ne.di.unimi.it/

Kate (+ XML plug-ins) for GUI else vi

For me, it's Kate.

jEdit and IntelliJ IDEA

vi/vim on *nix systems - textpad on windows - qedit on dos - wordstar in the non-document mode on cp/m - and what ever is installed on a main frame or mini computer... 8^)

I cut my teeth on old school Unix systems (we are talking dumb terminals folks!) with Emacs. It was more forgiving than vi. But as my career expanded, I found myself working on a variety of Unix systems (HP HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Sun SunOS, Sun Solaris, DEC Ultrix, Digital Unix, IBM AIX, *BSD, and later, many flavors of Linux). And guess what? I quickly discovered that vi was installed on ALL of them by default ALL of the time. So I ditched emacs and learned to love vi. It was always there, it was very fast and lightweight, especially using remote access, and it JustWorked. When I use Vim, I use it mostly for traditional vi features and sometimes the syntax highlighting is handy. GUI based editors and IDEs are often fads, they come and go, and may not be there when you need an editor the most. Whereas vi is forever. And it's consistent. Everyone who uses Unix and Linux should at least learn the basics of vi. And once you learn the basics, the advanced features like regular expression substitutions, multiple buffers, marking, etc, will blow your mind. You can do fast, powerful, and precise editing without even touching your mouse. Once I learned the advanced features of vi, I never looked back.

formerly kate, now sublime

vi in terminal/console
Sublime or TextWrangler in GUI

Notepad++ on Windows, VIM on Linux

Sublime and Atom, but keen to learn Vim in the future

kate (or nano if we're cli only)

I use slap in the terminal, it uses Atom's text-buffer implementation internally.