Solved Which text editor to use?
- Thread starter Skybear
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Yeah, I could more or less replicate it, but I just use Terminator (usually) with a black screen and white text.
I might have to play with your linked application you've linked. It probably won't change what I currently use.
I found a post by @SlowCoder from 2022 titled "How to Change the Colors of Nano." It looks like he did a lot of work in the coding. All I would like to do is to change the colour of the main screen from white to green. Is there a way to change that single colour?
Your colours in Nano would usually be the same as the colours in your Terminal.
What colours are they?
Wiz
What colours are they?
Wiz
As mentioned above, it is the color of the terminal emulator that nano relies upon for it's background color. However, many elements of the nano interface can be colored to change it from the default. The configuration alterations can be made by copying the file: /etc/nanorc, to the user's home directory:
/home/$USER, as a dotfile. That means copying the nanorc file that is in the /etc directory, to the /home/$USER directory as a file with the same name but preceded by a dot, so it appears as:
/home/$USER/.nanorc
Then one can open that file with a text editor and see what can be colorised. Some color configurations in that
/home/$USER/.nanorc file are as follows:
Code:
## Paint the interface elements of nano. These are examples; there are
## no colors by default, except for errorcolor and spotlightcolor.
# set titlecolor bold,white,blue
# set promptcolor lightwhite,grey
# set statuscolor bold,white,green
# set errorcolor bold,white,red
# set spotlightcolor black,lightyellow
# set selectedcolor lightwhite,#804
# set stripecolor ,#444
# set scrollercolor slate,#222
# set numbercolor cyan
# set keycolor cyan
# set functioncolor greenFor changing the colors of a terminal emulator, to alter the color of nano's background, one needs to use the configurations provided for the particular terminal emulator being used. They differ between emulators so one would need to research the particular choices made by the emulator and how it effects the configuration change.
Last edited:
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
Thank you very much for this, it's 6:30 AM here but I'll play with this as soon as I'm done with my obligations today.
Achievable with a few steps.
In your LM 22.3 'Zena' Cinnamon, by default you are using GNOME Terminal (gnome-terminal).
Open a fresh instance with Ctrl-Alt-t or from Menu or Panel.
In the main (black) body of the window, right-click, choose show Menubar.
From Menu, choose Edit-Preferences, then Colours.
From there, you can play with different options either in your default Profile, or set up a Custom Profile and make it the default
Cheers
Can one change the colour and then I comment it? I’d like to change the title colour to green. I.e. change “# set titlecolor bold,white,blue” to “# set titlecolor bold,green,blue”?
You can play around with the configuration file trying out different colors, commenting and uncommenting as much as you like. The nano command reads the .nanorc file each time nano opens a file so once you change a config you can check its effect by opening a file with nano.
The colors that are available, that is, the color names that you can use, are listed in the man page, so you can run the command:
man nanorc and under the option color, it lists the available colors. There's bold and italic options too.
Many people now use Neovim/Vim, VS Code or micro. If Nano seems too simple or visually harsh, try micro — it’s much more terminal-friendly and doesn’t require you to learn a bunch of shortcuts. Emacs is also popular, but it’s almost a separate operating system
I think there's a lot of them to choose from maybe there's more text editors than there is linux distros out there (I'm not an expert and therefore I don't know If my statement it's true, I'm just guessing). But yeah.
gnu/linux it's a fantastic operating system and let alone tool that let's you choose however you wanna use it and that's just wonderful.
You can use from gedit (a traditional text editor with a gui, menu and all that) or a completely simple but nevertheless powerful text editor such as nano (completely embedded on the terminal), it's pretty sweet!
It really is a wonderful experience!!!!!
Hey, that one it's not bad actually I used it many times as I liked to use bold text exclusively when I was younger to pretend I was working on an office (cuz for some reason that's the type of job I thought all adults had, including my own parents).
But growing up I started to use notepad a lot more than word for simplicity purposes (it just works) and it's faster than word in my opinion or at least it's lightweighter I think...
I have also tried notepad++ but just like one or two times, not much.
It was a sarcastic replyA suggestion made with your tongue firmly in your cheek@f33dm3bits.
You could try to use OpenOffice Writer. I have not tried that word processor yet but for some reasons in one of my jobs as a call center representative, this people had apache's open office installed on all the computers on the room where we were working. I didn't know there was another open office suite besides libre office's (which you can also try if you're interested).
Though you might have to install the full office suite from apache's open office and then you will be able to use the open office writer specifically.
...I don't think you can install open office writer without the rest of the programs that complete the rest of the office suite (If I'm not wrong).
...almost!?
geez, that's sounds like emacs it's deeply configurable, customizable and textualizable at it's core basis.
It's been a few days since I paid attention to this thread and it's fascinating to come back to it and see different people's preferences and use cases.
When I was using various text editors on MS DOS, it always irked me that the text was always white on black. Just plain green on black was so much better to my eye... Though I did go retro with a CP/M machine with an ADM-3A terminal in white on black.
Nowadays, I try to use a different colored terminal for various ssh sessions but my text editor is always either green on black for generic text or whatever colors syntax highlighting imposes for any given language.
In days gone by, I used WordStar on CP/M.
I don't at all remember what I used on the C64.
On DOS, I was on a quest to find something I liked, finally settling on epsilon 2.1 after trying qedit, which was ok but not great and the MSDOS (BASIC) editor, which I hated. edlin saved my bacon once when I had to use my trusty ADM-3A on the DOS machine because my monitor got fried. I tried many other editors with no memorable preferences. After I had used a bootleg copy of epsilon 2.1 for a while, I decided I liked it well enough to actually buy the product and moved to version 6.3 - and with the new features, my coding productivity immediately improved very noticeably although, sadly, programming/coding was no part of my actual job at the time.
On Windows there were a bunch of text editors that were decent (unlike notepad) but I eventually upgraded to epsilon 9.x.
On Linux, epsilon wasn't available for Linux when I first started using Linux so I used a few different editors. Emacs was always there but for some reason (or perhaps no reason at all) I usually used zile instead. joe, jed, nano, and vim all got limited screen time. Eventually, I sprung for an upgrade to epsilon and version 13 has a linux version, although it's 32 bit only (statis linked binary, so it runs fine on 64 bit Linux). 64 bit came along in version 14, but I don't really need that and my circumstances don't support spending money for it. Too bad it's not FOSS!
---
re. "chording" - I'd never heard it called that before, but it makes sense.
re. "always set my terminals to green on black" - The industry tried for the longest time to sell us on "black on white is so much easier on the eyes" and for the longest time, I though I must just have strange eyes. Sounds like it was a lie from the very beginning. Why do I suspect MS is to blame for that?
I just recently changed my local terminal windows to cyan on black because it fit a little better with the rest of my theme.
When I was using various text editors on MS DOS, it always irked me that the text was always white on black. Just plain green on black was so much better to my eye... Though I did go retro with a CP/M machine with an ADM-3A terminal in white on black.
Nowadays, I try to use a different colored terminal for various ssh sessions but my text editor is always either green on black for generic text or whatever colors syntax highlighting imposes for any given language.
In days gone by, I used WordStar on CP/M.
I don't at all remember what I used on the C64.
On DOS, I was on a quest to find something I liked, finally settling on epsilon 2.1 after trying qedit, which was ok but not great and the MSDOS (BASIC) editor, which I hated. edlin saved my bacon once when I had to use my trusty ADM-3A on the DOS machine because my monitor got fried. I tried many other editors with no memorable preferences. After I had used a bootleg copy of epsilon 2.1 for a while, I decided I liked it well enough to actually buy the product and moved to version 6.3 - and with the new features, my coding productivity immediately improved very noticeably although, sadly, programming/coding was no part of my actual job at the time.
On Windows there were a bunch of text editors that were decent (unlike notepad) but I eventually upgraded to epsilon 9.x.
On Linux, epsilon wasn't available for Linux when I first started using Linux so I used a few different editors. Emacs was always there but for some reason (or perhaps no reason at all) I usually used zile instead. joe, jed, nano, and vim all got limited screen time. Eventually, I sprung for an upgrade to epsilon and version 13 has a linux version, although it's 32 bit only (statis linked binary, so it runs fine on 64 bit Linux). 64 bit came along in version 14, but I don't really need that and my circumstances don't support spending money for it. Too bad it's not FOSS!
---
re. "chording" - I'd never heard it called that before, but it makes sense.
re. "always set my terminals to green on black" - The industry tried for the longest time to sell us on "black on white is so much easier on the eyes" and for the longest time, I though I must just have strange eyes. Sounds like it was a lie from the very beginning. Why do I suspect MS is to blame for that?
I just recently changed my local terminal windows to cyan on black because it fit a little better with the rest of my theme.
...almost!?
geez, that's sounds like emacs it's deeply configurable, customizable and textualizable at it's core basis.
---
Did someone not once say, "emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent text editor". I have no idea who said it, though I suspect it was one of those "vi" people.
I can't take credit for the naming. It was fairly commonly used by Emacs users.
Hmm... It looks like it's still in use today. Well, that's what Google is telling me.
I'm sure it comes from music, where a chord is playing more than one note so that they ring out at the same time. If you don't fret anything and just play the open chord on a guitar (in standard tuning), you'll be playing an E chord. That would be properly called 'chording'. On a piano, you simply press more than one key at a time to make a chord.
As we've had music terminology a lot longer than we've had keyboards to type on, I'm sure that is where they got chording, which is the process of playing a chord.
One of my favorite obscure words is 'chordophonic'. And, for more fun, both a piano and a guitar are 'chordophones'.
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