Solved Which text editor to use?

[MikeRocor]

Just out of curiosity, how on Earth have we had a thread this long about text editors without so much as a flame war, let alone an all out religious jihusade (tm)? Are people actually more interested in -what- we type rather than -how- we type it? Have we actually grown up? And if we have, can we ctrl-z that?

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jihusade : a non-denominational "holy war" (imtu)

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imtu : "I Made That Up"

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ctrl-z : the "undo" one, not the "scroll up" one

 

[abdulwasay4585]

I use vs code, and sublime text

 

[tinfoil-hat]

I am using VIM in terminal, xed sometimes and for projects I use VSCodium

 

[bigkenny]

I too just wanted a basic ed I use xed seems ok and does all I need

 

[yuva_kiran_19]

I've used Nano a bit, but it's visually very stark. I've heard of emacs and another one I can't remember the name of right now. But what text editor do other here use?

Use micro, it is very simple. It is not a GUI but provides features like in GUI . Pretty simple to use in terminal.
Controls are similar to GUI editors like
ctrl+s
ctrl+z
ctrl+o to open existing file
ctrl+q to quit
ctrl+x to cut and v to paste

 

[AmethystAngel]

Microsoft Word

Hi ~~ I've never used forums before, so bear with me. I have the MS Office 2021 desktop suite. Is there a way to "install" it on my Zorin OS 18? I'm going to be uninstalling OneDrive very shortly but I am reticent to give up on Word, Excel, & PowerPoint. I know there are a lot of videos about how to install MS office apps on Linux distros but my trust level is 6 ft under where MS is concerned. I'm 63 y/o. Please help.

 

[f33dm3bits]

Hi ~~ I've never used forums before, so bear with me. I have the MS Office 2021 desktop suite. Is there a way to "install" it on my Zorin OS 18?

My reply was sarcastic, I don't use it. You can try if LibeOffice works for you otherwise. There's probably some way to do so with Wine but I haven't done that recently so I can't advise on that.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

Hi ~~ I've never used forums before, so bear with me. I have the MS Office 2021 desktop suite. Is there a way to "install" it on my Zorin OS 18? I'm going to be uninstalling OneDrive very shortly but I am reticent to give up on Word, Excel, & PowerPoint. I know there are a lot of videos about how to install MS office apps on Linux distros but my trust level is 6 ft under where MS is concerned. I'm 63 y/o. Please help.

Try out OnlyOffice, it's pretty similar to Microsoft Word. For me it's a bit easier to use than LibreOffice

 

[deb_user]

LibreOffice can use Office documents, or the open document text format .odt that is also used by Office. It will work much better on Linux than trying to run Office under wine.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

there's also a pretty good screen editor. written in qb64 by one of the members of the phoenix edition forum. the program is called "scrned". it could be created on linux. unfortunately it has a "win32 api" call. that causes it to fail to compile. moreover that forum doesn't permit anymore. accessing links to programs directly. unless someone is member of that site. otherwise i would recommend this program. it is somewhat like "nano." it might help someone learn programming concepts. not necessarily basic.

the qb64 phoenix edition forum is opened once again! so i could recommend this text editor. if you're adventurous enough.

Small full screen editor

qb64phoenix.com

take the code file called "SCRNQB64.BAS" only. the others don't matter. unless you do use ms-dos or windows 3.x ...

comment out entirely the final function listed in the source code.

then add a function, named alike. which simply calls "command$" built-in basic function. this should work on linux. i have verified it. as i've said, this should work on any version of qb64. beginning with qb64 2.0.2. the final offering of "dot-net" site that became extinct circa april2022.

this program works a bit slowly. on an elderly laptop like mine. with "only" 4gb ram and 2 cpu cores. it's recommended to run from the terminal. it must be given a text file to edit. cannot create from scratch. this could be a deal-breaker for some people. it will ask. if it should expect a text file to have ascii10 "\n" line-ending like linux expects. or "\r\n" combination like in windows. another thing that might be upsetting to some people. is that the user gets one chance to save. press "escape" then the program asks if the file should be saved. then it quits. the program must be started again to resume editing the text file.

(pressing "escape" to save and then quit. was a function of the program by mcafee for ms-dos. don't remember what it was called.)

it does not have "modern commodities." like word-wrap and regular-expression search. this program was an impressive effort. by a guy who coded for 16-bit microsoft language products during the 1990's. this is noticed when the user fires up this program. without giving an existing text file. it asks if the user wants a list of text files from the current directory. it fails, of course because on linux. the command is "ls" not "dir" to make a listing. the fix is more complicated than what was mentioned above. otherwise i would have to provide the fixed source code. which is not good form. where proper credit must be given to the original author.

 

[Mike-BTU]

Try out OnlyOffice, it's pretty similar to Microsoft Word. For me it's a bit easier to use than LibreOffice

I just tried OnlyOffice. Thanks for the suggestion, but I found that it was so much different than Libre Office (what I'm used to) that I decided to come back to the former another time.

YMMV.

For text files I mostly use Kate.

 

[Mike-BTU]

... See here for some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors.
That expands out slightly from @osprey 's link.

 

[bigkenny]

Hi ~~ I've never used forums before, so bear with me. I have the MS Office 2021 desktop suite. Is there a way to "install" it on my Zorin OS 18? I'm going to be uninstalling OneDrive very shortly but I am reticent to give up on Word, Excel, & PowerPoint. I know there are a lot of videos about how to install MS office apps on Linux distros but my trust level is 6 ft under where MS is concerned. I'm 63 y/o. Please help.

Well as others have said The Linux free suite LibreOffice is good. I use it have come from Windows Word/Excel 2010 and works well enough. When saving though it saves as 2007 but thats ok so far for me. Its free and works

 

[bigkenny]

LibreOffice can use Office documents, or the open document text format .odt that is also used by Office. It will work much better on Linux than trying to run Office under wine.

yes I`ve given up with using wine LibreOffice is good and free works good

 

[deb_user]

FWIW, there is also a Windows version of LibreOffice. In fact, AFAICT that's its main focus.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

one more candidate has arrived.

Notepad - QB64-PE Edition

qb64phoenix.com

 

[deb_user]

it asks if the user wants a list of text files from the current directory. it fails, of course because on linux. the command is "ls" not "dir" to make a listing. the fix is more complicated than what was mentioned above. otherwise i would have to provide the fixed source code. which is not good form. where proper credit must be given to the original author.

Linux has had the dir command for a long time. It works, although it has fewer options than ls.

 

[MikeRocor]

Linux has had the dir command for a long time. It works, although it has fewer options than ls.

I could be mistaken, of course, but I had thought that "dir" in linux was a common alias for "ls". There is no "dir" on my system, though that means little in this context.

 

[osprey]

I could be mistaken, of course, but I had thought that "dir" in linux was a common alias for "ls". There is no "dir" on my system, though that means little in this context.

The dir command is usually in the coreutils package, along with ls and many of the other basic terminal commands, for example on debian on this machine:

[~]$ apt-file list coreutils | grep -iE 'ls\.1|dir\.1'
coreutils: /usr/share/man/man1/dir.1.gz
coreutils: /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz
<snip>

Core Linux uses busybox instead of coreutils.
The busybox installed on this machine (running debian) shows that dir isn't present among the executables:

[~]$ busybox --help
BusyBox v1.37.0 (Debian 1:1.37.0-10.1) multi-call binary.
<snip>
Currently defined functions:
    [, [[, acpid, adjtimex, ar, arch, arp, arping, ascii, ash, awk, base64, basename, bc, blkdiscard, blkid, blockdev, brctl,
    bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cal, cat, chattr, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp, cp, cpio, crc32, crond, crontab,
    cttyhack, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, depmod, devmem, df, diff, dirname, dmesg, dnsdomainname, dos2unix, dpkg, dpkg-deb, du,
    dumpkmap, dumpleases, echo, ed, egrep, env, expand, expr, factor, fallocate, false, fatattr, fdisk, fgrep, find, findfs, fold,
    free, freeramdisk, fsfreeze, fstrim, ftpget, ftpput, getfattr, getopt, getty, grep, groups, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hexdump,
    hostid, hostname, httpd, hwclock, i2cdetect, i2cdump, i2cget, i2cset, i2ctransfer, id, ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, init, insmod,
    install, ionice, ip, ipcalc, kill, killall, klogd, last, less, link, linux32, linux64, linuxrc, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, logger,
    login, logname, logread, losetup, ls, lsattr, lsmod, lsscsi, lzcat, lzma, lzop, md5sum, mdev, microcom, mim, mkdir, mkdosfs,
    mke2fs, mkfifo, mknod, mkpasswd, mkswap, mktemp, modinfo, modprobe, more, mount, mt, mv, nameif, nbd-client, nc, netstat, nl,
    nologin, nproc, nsenter, nslookup, nuke, od, openvt, partprobe, passwd, paste, patch, pidof, ping, ping6, pivot_root, poweroff,
    printf, ps, pwd, rdate, readlink, realpath, reboot, renice, reset, resize, resume, rev, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, rpm, rpm2cpio,
    run-init, run-parts, sed, seq, setkeycodes, setpriv, setsid, sh, sha1sum, sha256sum, sha3sum, sha512sum, shred, shuf, sleep,
    sort, ssl_client, start-stop-daemon, stat, strings, stty, su, sulogin, svc, svok, swapoff, swapon, switch_root, sync, sysctl,
    syslogd, tac, tail, tar, taskset, tc, tee, telnet, test, tftp, time, timeout, top, touch, tr, traceroute, traceroute6, true,
    truncate, ts, tty, tunctl, ubirename, udhcpc, udhcpc6, udhcpd, uevent, umount, uname, uncompress, unexpand, uniq, unix2dos,
    unlink, unlzma, unshare, unxz, unzip, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vconfig, vi, w, watch, watchdog, wc, wget, which,
    who, whoami, xargs, xxd, xz, xzcat, yes, zcat

dir isn't an alias for ls, but a separate command. It was in DOS before linux was created and I guess that is its origin. ls pretty much covers it so dir is largely redundant for ordinary file listing. It may however, be useful in scripting contexts where it can provide a particular consistent output format which the coder may find preferable.