Solved Which text editor to use?

[Skybear]

That reminds me... At one stage in my life, I was fairly fluent in both Emacs and Vi. This was before VIM existed. As for Emacs, there's a bunch of chording available that will make your life easier.

These days, I mostly just use Nano in the terminal. I use Featherpad in the GUI. For a more dedicated writing area, I've been using ONLYOFFICE as of late. You can do things like add AI to do grammar and spelling checks. Well, you could do more with it than that, but that's all I use it for.

What is chording?

 

[Skybear]

You can make your terminal dark and it will be easier on your eyes.

Open your terminal and go to:
Edit> Profile preferences> Background

My background is black and the text is green. Kinda like the terminal screens of old. It’s just when I open Nano that the menu bars and such are bright white. But, now that I think about opening the Grub file, the text there was purple, I think.

 

[Skybear]

I always set my terminals to green text on black background. That's all you got once upon a time, and I still like it. Monitors haven't always been full color. There was green, there was amber, and eventually white for text. I still prefer green, maybe because that's the color I had on my first real monitor.

Same here.

 

[wizardfromoz]

Yeah, I have preferred green on black for years.

BTW Mike before I forget, a useful tip for Nano is to launch it with the

-m

option, eg

sudo nano -m <path/to/file>

It allows a point and click, mouselike functionality to navigate more easily.

@osprey , Leafpad used to ship with Debian, and in fact is still default on a number of my distros, but it was maintained irregularly and updated some times years apart. L3afpad, as we might guess, was forked from it. (and I am betting I am telling the bloke something he already knows, but some might find it of interest, lol).

Avagudweegend

Wizard

 

[Alexzee]

My background is black and the text is green. Kinda like the terminal screens of old. It’s just when I open Nano that the menu bars and such are bright white. But, now that I think about opening the Grub file, the text there was purple, I think.

You may be able to change that.
With my custom theme installed and tweaked on my Debian installation opening nano is dark and the lettering is green.

The blinding white is one of my grivevances like you, 'the bright white' causes migraine headaches.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

You may be able to change that.

Looks worth setting, how did you do it?

 

[Alexzee]

Looks worth setting, how did you do it?

I went looking for Full Icon Themes at mate-look. Choose a dark theme. Then downloaded the tar.gz and extracted it to my Downloads directory. Once extracted to the Downloads directory, I moved it with root privileges to the /usr/share/icons/ directory.

Then launched the 'Control Center' in the Mate DE and selected Appearance. Once in 'Appearance' I clicked 'Customize' and a new window opened. That window called: 'Customize Theme' displayed a list to choose from. Those being: Controls, Window Boarders, Icons and pointer. The new theme that I moved with root privileges was in the list under Icons so selecting it brought joy.

Colorful-Dark-Icons

Icons for Dark Plasma Themes -Dark Rounded Plasma Theme Colorful-Dark-Plasma : Here -Dark Rounded Global Theme (Look-and-Feel) Colorful-Dark-Global : Here

www.opendesktop.org

Atomic-dark theme [gtk-2.0]

Elegant dark color scheme for gtk-2.0. Colors have been selected procedurally (algorithms) to balance the perceived brightness (see...

www.opendesktop.org

I've had success with dark themes with Linux Mint and with Debian Trixie. Slackware also:-
Not all themes that are gtk2 and gtk3 fair well. I've had a few hours of downloading, installing and tweaking to see which plays out the best.

 

[Clem_Dye]

If you don't mind going over to the 'dark side', Microsoft Edit is worth a try. I'm using the earlier non-Rust version and for general editing it's perfectly fine. At other times, nano is my friend if I'm working in the terminal.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Full Icon Themes at mate-look

I appreciate it, but I was asking about nano editor coloring, that's what you attached to your previous post.

 

[Clem_Dye]

My apologies, I thought that you referring to colour editing in general.

 

[deb_user]

I suspect that the color of the menus and such are set by the terminal emulator. I don't often use nano, but I just opened it in yakuake and the menus, etc were just the reverse of the terminal colors, black text on green. I've set that in the yakuake settings. There should be settings for colors in any terminal emulator, but I don't know what you're using. Nano will just use whatever is set, it doesn't control colors itself, AFAIK.

 

[KGIII]

That's all you got once upon a time, and I still like it.

I once had a fancy monitor. It had TWO colors! I had green OR amber! No, you couldn't use both at once. You had to flip a switch on the monitor itself.

 

[KGIII]

What is chording?

Using multiple keys to do something. We use it all the time, but probably not to the extent of Emacs. For example, press CTRL _ ALT + T on your keyboard. In many distros, that'll bring up your default terminal emulator.

It is also used in GUI applications. In your favorite word processor, write some text. Then, CTRL + A will highlight it. CTRL + I will turn it into italics. Finally, CTRL + S will save the document. Imagine all of that in a text editor that doesn't have much in the way of a GUI.

It now has a GUI, but you can be faster just using the keyboard. Plus, as I recall, not all features can be done with just the GUI. I type quickly. So, it costs me time to reach for a mouse. It also disrupts my flow. That means I do quite a bit with just the keyboard. I don't do as much as some, but it's like a lot more than most.

If you want a more old-school experience, start Emacs with emacs -nw.

 

[deb_user]

I once had a fancy monitor. It had TWO colors! I had green OR amber! No, you couldn't use both at once. You had to flip a switch on the monitor itself.

I thought I might have remembered something like that, but it was so long ago I can't be sure. Sometimes it's hard to tell which are true memories and which are false. I know I did use amber at one time, and it wasn't my favorite.

 

[KGIII]

I thought I might have remembered something like that, but it was so long ago I can't be sure. Sometimes it's hard to tell which are true memories and which are false. I know I did use amber at one time, and it wasn't my favorite.

I got mine at a discount. A buddy worked at a computer store, and they'd taken it in on trade (I'm pretty sure that's the reason). It was fairly large for the day, but I can't remember its actual size. I got a lot of gear from him. Some I sold on at a profit, others I kept. It's unlikely, knowing the kid, that he was stealing stuff from work. I'd sometimes go into his place of employment to talk to him, and sometimes to the owner.

Heh.. I remember the early days of colored screens. In many ways, they were disappointing for my use. Much of what I did lacked any sort of GUI at all. The monochrome monitor had a much sharper image (great for text) than a color monitor, simply because of how color works on a CRT.

LOL, I decided to sanity check my last statement. I wasn't sure if I was remembering properly, but my memory is correct, and I even properly remembered why that was the case.

Oh! My first flat screen, not CRT but maybe TFT, monitor experience was also amber. I do not remember if that was the one that had green as an option. Also, that was just my experience. I didn't own the system. That was owned by somebody else.

As for the memories, I'm doing okay -- all things considered.

I can recall quite a lot of my past. I'm not sure how or why. Let's just say that I didn't always do much to take care of my brain. So, perhaps I'm lucky. In my case, a lot of the memories are attached to accomplishments. Maybe that helps?

 

[deb_user]

Different people have different memory capabilities. Mine used to be pretty good, but as I age I notice it getting worse. I have those "what did I come in here for?" moments, and sometimes a delay in recalling a word. This started a few years before I made my 80th trip around the sun.

 

[KGIII]

Different people have different memory capabilities.

Absolutely. If my brain were a Windows HDD, I'd say it could use a defrag now and again.

Mine used to be pretty good, but as I age I notice it getting worse.

I was told (at a fairly young age) that the human brain (of which part is our memory) needs to be stimulated, much like how muscles do. Take an active effort to learn new stuff, recount old stuff, etc...

So, I work on learning stuff almost every day. By that, I mean I make an effort to learn something. I don't just learn incidentally, but specifically. It's like practicing guitar. If you just sit around and noodle for that hour, you probably didn't learn anything. If you spent that hour working on doing odd chord progressions in a more fluid manner and with a metronome, you'll learn more about the guitar than you would have if you'd just noodled about with it.

It's not that it's bad to noddle. It's that you won't learn all that much while doing so.

 

[deb_user]

I admit that I do more noodling on my guitars than directed practice these days. I prefer to play tunes, and it's not unusual to drift into noodling when improvising on ATTYA. But I try to learn something every day. As little as I know, that isn't so hard.

 

[KGIII]

As little as I know, that isn't so hard.

 

[osprey]

@KGIII wrote:

I once had a fancy monitor. It had TWO colors! I had green OR amber!

@deb_user wrote:

I thought I might have remembered something like that, but it was so long ago I can't be sure.

Those amber and green terminals are still available today in a modern terminal emulator found here: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term.

It's cool-retro-term. Here's the amber one. There's a green and blue one at the homepage link above.