PC-style text editors for Unix

In computer science, a good simple convenient text editor is a must. And most of them have Windows heritage ;-) To this end, we've included a multitude of Windows-style lightweight editors available today.

• Cooledit  -- CoolEdit is part of a suite of surprisingly easy and full featured apps. Console version is used by Midnight Commander under the name mcedit. It features multiple file editing, completely user definable highlighting, keyboard commands etc. While it's not the prettiest app, don't let appearances fool you, it is very capable. See also What Is CoolEdit.
   
  • Mcedit  -- FILENAME" It is actually a modified version of CoolEdit. It is a very nice, very easy editor that offers a wide variety of features, including context-sensitive highlighting, formatting, search and replace, and more. If you're finding Emacs or vi to be a little too much, give it a try.
     
• gedit -- Part of the standard GNOME distriibution, gedit is a nice, simple fast editor that is similar to Windows Notepad, but is extensible via plugins. In the current version you can have open multiple files, and normal MS Windows conventions (like CTRL-C CTRL-V) work. If you're new to Linux, check it out!
   
• gnotepad+  -- Another GNOME Editor, gnotepad+ looks fairly simple, but has a lot of nice features. Again, it uses standard Windows conventions, and offers unique items such as:
  • HTML tag help
  • Captures output from terminal
  • Open/edit multiple files
  • (Semi) WYSIWYG HTML Preview
  • Netscape preview of HTML Files
  • Multiple Windows
  • Search and replace (normal and Regex)
• GXedit 
• Gedit
• Kwrite  -- The "Advanced Editor" standard on KDE 1.1.x, Kwrite is very similar to Windows editors such as Borland's editor, or Arachnaphobia. It offers excellent highlighting for C/C++, JAVA, HTML, Perl, and everything else I've tried. While not overly complex, this is a nice editor for people making the transition from Windows to Unix. It is started by Programs -> Editors -> Kwrite or "$ kwrite" on the command line.

GUI-based environments have some pretty decent PC-style editors link KDE_KEdit and Nedit. For command line situation is not so good, but still there are some decent implementations...

mcedit

MC also comes with what appears to be a much better editor known as mcedit. This is a console window version of CoolEdit, but the development stalled long ago. 

This editor has interesting non standard for Windows cut and paste scheme. First F3 marks start of selection, second F3 marks the end of selection and highlight the selection. Then you can move your cursor. If you press F5, selected area will be moved to the cursor location. If you press F6, selected area will be copied and inserted to the cursor location. F2 will save file.F10 will get you out. Most other cursor keys works intuitively for Windows users

This editor can be directly started like:

     $ mc -e filename_to_edit
     $ mcedit filename_to_edit

This is not a multi-window editor but one can use multiple Linux console to achieve same effect. To copy between windows, ALT-Fn-keys to switch virtual consoles and use "File->Insert file" or "File->Copy to file" to move portion of file to other files.

In Midnight Commander this internal editor can be replaced with any external editor of choice.

Also many programs use environment variables EDITOR or VISUAL to decide which editor to use. If you are uncomfortable with vim, set these to "mcedit" by in ~/.bashrc:

     ...
     export EDITOR=mcedit
     export VISUAL=mcedit
     ...

jEdit

jEdit - Open Source programmer's text editor -- if you use Java (1.4.2 or later, then it might be an optimal choice, otherwise it might be too much staff to install ;-)

jEdit is a mature and well-designed programmer's text editor that has been in development for over 5 years.

While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The core of jEdit is primarily developed by Slava Pestov, and jEdit plugins are being written by a large and diverse team of programmers from around the world.

Some of jEdit's features include:

• Written in Java, so it runs on MacOS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
• Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Dozens of macros and plugins available.
• Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature.
• Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 80 languages.
• Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode.
• Folding for selectively hiding regions of text.
• Word wrap.
• Highly configurable and customizable.
• Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor. See the Features page for a full list.

LE - le editor 1.9 by Alexander V. Lukyanov - February 25th 2000, 12:37 EST. See also ftp://ftp.yars.free.net/pub/software/unix/util/texteditors/

LE 1.9 supports Perl and has many block operations with stream and rectangular blocks, can edit both unix and dos style files (LF/CRLF), is binary clean, has hex mode, can edit files and mmap'pable devices in mmap shared mode (only replace), has tunable syntax highlighting, tunable color scheme (can use default colors), tunable key map. It is slightly similar to Norton Editor, but has more features.

JED

The JED Programmer's Editor  -- a free text editor for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, and MS Windows based on S-Lang scripting language.  Default set of commands close to WordStar(or Borland IDE, if you wish ;-).  Actively developed and has active mailing list.

It is relatively small (less than 200K), loads fast, does not take much disk space or memory.   Included on most Linux distributions.  For a long tyme it is used as a standard editor on Slackware. On RH is it configured to emulated Emacs mode (actually it's doing it pretty well and is noticeably faster). To change to WordStar mode one needs to edit file /usr/lib/jed/lib/jed.rc and

• commend out emacs related line()=evalfile("emacs");
• uncomment the line ()=evalfile("wordstar");

Developed by John E. Davis, who also developed S-Lang language. Embeddable implementation of S-lang is often called S-lang library is pretty popular and used in Midnight Commander and Lynx, MOST, and SLRN.

 and participated in the development of Color Lynx, rxvt. slsc.

The color highlighting is a big plus. The latest version is B0.99-7 which may be obtained via ftp from space.mit.edu which is also mirrored in Europe at ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/unix/misc/slang. Among features:

• Color syntax highlighting on color terminals, e.g., Linux console or a remote color terminal via dialup (as well as Xjed).
• Folding mode and selective display if jed is compiled with line attribute support. To enable folding mode, you must set the variable Fold_Mode_Ok to non-zero value in your jedrc file. See doc/fold.txt for more information. `set_color ("...", "blue", "white");' may be used to set the color of the "..." hidden line indicator.
• Drop-down menus on _ALL_ terminals. Only from version 0.99
• Emulation of Emacs, EDT, Wordstar, Borland, and and Brief editors.
• Extensible in a language resembling C(S-Lang). Completely customizable.
• Capable of read GNU info files from within JED's info browser
• A variety of programming modes (with syntax highlighting) are available including C, C++, FORTRAN, TeX, HTML, SH, IDL, DCL, NROFF...
• Edit TeX files with AUC-TeX style editing (BiBTeX support too).
• Asynchronous subprocess support. If asynchronous subprocess support is enabled, jed will compile in the background.
• Built-in support for the GPM mouse driver on Linux console.
• Abbreviation mode and Dynamic abbreviation mode.
• Bookmarks support(called for some reason line marks). See online documentation `create_line_mark'. This is a bookmark that has a color associated with it. A line that has a line mark will be displayed using this color.
• 8 bit clean with mutekey support.
• Rectangular cut/paste; regular expressions; incremental searches; search replace across multiple files; multiple windows; multiple buffers; shell modes; directory editor (dired); mail; rmail; ispell; and much, much more.
• Mark Olesen's sendmail and mail-alias slang packages have been integrated into jed.  See sendmail.sl for more information.

There is also a useful add-on jedstate. Using jedstate together with jed's startup_hook() and exit_hook() as glue, jed remembers the cursor position of all visited files and will automatically jump to that position again when the files are revisited. The database, which is gdbm based, is purgeable on a "time since last view" criterion. Jedstate comes with two sample hooks for easy integration with jed.

Additional sources of information:

• Documentation
  • JED, A Programmer's Editor
  • Another JED description
• RPMs
  • charl's jed page -- Linux binaries and rpms
  • RPM of Group Applications-Editors
  • Debian GNU-Linux -- jed
  • Debian GNU-Linux -- jed-common
• Online information on Jed and other programs from Ohio State University (Jan Hlavacek).
• Online Jed information from Florence, Italy (Roberto Cecchini).
• Online Jed information from Vienna, Austria.
• Some online documentation on slrn, JED's newsreader.
• The slrn FAQ.

NEdit

• NEdit the current version is 5.1. C-like macro language. NEdit is now one of the most popular editors in the Unix community. Version 5.1 is the first release of NEdit under the GNU General Public License, and the first release to be done entirely by volunteer effort. See also APPWATCH.com Free Software - Open Source
  
  "NEdit is a standard GUI (Graphical User Interface) style text editor for programs and plain-text files. Users of Macintosh and MS Windows based text editors should find NEdit a familiar and comfortable environment. NEdit provides all of the standard menu, dialog, editing, and mouse support, as well as all of the standard shortcuts to which the users of modern GUI based environments are accustomed. For users of older style Unix editors, welcome to the world of mouse-based editing!"
  
  "The most significant enhancements in this release are:
  • New regular expression code, boosts highlighting performance by 40%, and introduces many new and powerful features to regular expression operations and syntax highlighting.
  • Incremental search, and optional search bar.
  • New ctags code with full support for Exuberant Ctags, better handling of tag collisions, multiple tag file support, on-demand loading of tag files, and automatic reload of modified tag files.
  • Optional display of line numbers along the left side of the text.
  • NEdit can now read and write MS DOS format files.
  • New built-in syntax highlighting patterns for Lex, PostScript, SQL, and Matlab, and improved SGML/HTML and Java patterns. Many minor improvements to other patterns.
  • Improved international character set input
  • New macro subroutines: list_dialog, getenv, set_language_mode.
  • Optional warnings about external modifications to files
  • Clearcase awareness
  • Session manager restart capability"

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20151206 : How To Install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Linux by Vivek Gite ( How To Install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Linux, Dec 06, 2015 )
• 20121129 : Geany - A Great Lightweight Code Editor For Linux ( Geany - A Great Lightweight Code Editor For Linux, Nov 29, 2012 )

Old News ;-)

[Dec 06, 2015] How To Install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Linux by Vivek Gite

November 18, 2015

Visual Studio code (VScode) is the cross-platform Chromium-based code editor is being open sourced today by Microsoft. How do I install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on a Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora Linux desktop?

Visual Studio supports debugging Linux apps and code editor now open source by Microsoft. It is a preview (beta) version but you can test it and use it on your own Linux based desktop.

From the project website:

Visual Studio Code provides developers with a new choice of developer tool that combines the simplicity and streamlined experience of a code editor with the best of what developers need for their core code-edit-debug cycle. Visual Studio Code is the first code editor, and first cross-platform development tool - supporting OS X, Linux, and Windows - in the Visual Studio family. If you use Unity, ASP.NET 5, NODE.JS or related tool, give it a try.

Requirements for Visual Studio Code on Linux

1. Ubuntu Desktop version 14.04
2. GLIBCXX version 3.4.15 or later
3. GLIBC version 2.15 or later

The following installation instructions are tested on:

1. Fedora Linux 22 and 23
2. Debian Linux 8
3. Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS

Download Visual Studio Code

Visit this page to grab the latest version and save it to ~/Downloads/ folder on Linux desktop:

Make a new folder (say $HOME/VSCode) and extract VSCode-linux-x64.zip inside that folder or in /usr/local/ folder. Unzip VSCode-linux64.zip to that folder.

Alternate install method

You can use the wget command to download VScode as follows:
$ wget 'https://az764295.vo.msecnd.net/public/0.10.1-release/VSCode-linux64.zip'
Sample outputs:

--2015-11-18 13:55:23--  https://az764295.vo.msecnd.net/public/0.10.1-release/VSCode-linux64.zip
Resolving az764295.vo.msecnd.net (az764295.vo.msecnd.net)... 93.184.215.200, 2606:2800:11f:179a:1972:2405:35b:459
Connecting to az764295.vo.msecnd.net (az764295.vo.msecnd.net)|93.184.215.200|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 64638315 (62M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: 'VSCode-linux64.zip'
 
100%[======================================>] 64,638,315  84.9MB/s   in 0.7s
 
2015-11-18 13:55:23 (84.9 MB/s) - 'VSCode-linux64.zip' saved [64638315/64638315]
 

Install VScode using the command line

Cd to ~/Download/ location, enter:
$ cd ~/Download/
$ ls -l
Sample outputs:

Unzip VSCode-linux64.zip in /usr/local/ directory, enter:
$ sudo unzip VSCode-linux64.zip -d /usr/local/

Cd into /usr/local/ to create the soft-link as follows using the ln command for the Code executable. This is useful to run VSCode from the terminal application:
$ su -
# cd /usr/local/
# ls -l
# cd bin/
# ln -s ../VSCode-linux-x64/Code code
# exit
Sample session:

How do I use VSCode on Linux?

Open the Terminal app and type the following command:
$ /usr/local/bin/code

And, there you have it, the VSCode installed and working correctly on the latest version of Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora Linux. I suggest that you read getting started pages from Microsoft to understand the core concepts that will make you more productive writing and navigating your code.

[Nov 29, 2012] Geany - A Great Lightweight Code Editor For Linux

However, I'm glad to know that there are now two really good IDEs out there, and Geany is one of them. Compared to Eclipse, the other good IDE, it's much more lightweight but just as capable.

... ... ...

Aside from being lightweight, Geany does a great job of staying out of the way while you code, and displaying certain features right where you need them. Line numbers, syntax highlighting, automatically closing braces, parenthesis, and more, all do what they need to do, and don't alter your personal workflow style. For a programmer, it's very good to develop a coding habit you're comfortable with and use a code editor that doesn't force you to do things differently.

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Dead Editors Society

FED

[Nov 14, 2000] FED - a folding text editor

FED is a dead folding text editor for MS-DOS and Linux, with source code freely available under the GPL. It features:

• fast and intuitive user interface
• color syntax highlighting
• can fold blocks of text out of sight, based on code indentation
• multiple levels of undo and redo
• incremental 'as you type' searching
• search/replace through multiple files
• browse function to quickly find all references to a symbol
• automatic compiler error location
• context-sensitive access to external help systems
• flexible wordwrap, which correctly handles indented blocks of text
• block indent/unindent
• binary and hex editing modes for hacking executable and data files
• record/playback keystroke macros
• built in tetris game and screensaver
• configuration options to alter key bindings, screen colors, etc

DOS: fed.zip (262k)

Linux: fed.tar.gz (200k)

ZED

ZED -- practically dead and should probably be removed. Was developed by Sandro Serafini; has decent DOS port. Default command set is WordStar like, but can easily be changed. Current version seems to be 1.03 (as of July 1999). Does not make much sense in view of existence of Jed.

• Can use ANY keysequence (e.g. define a block with shift-arrow !) even under unix local text terminal (linux).
• intelligent screen update (NOT using the slow (n)curses).
• Column blocks with insert & overwrite.
• multi window/multi buffer.
• color c++, html, tex, java, mail file.
• shows parenthesis matching, searches for C functions, reindents C blocks.
• about 200 commands and 100 variables to deal with.
• Can edit/insert control codes (ascii 0-31 and 128-159).
• executes programs with output redirected on a window (i.e. make, man, etc...).
• Can load files with CRLF and/or CR and/or LF end-of-line marker.
• clipboard and delete buffer.
• savable run-time macros.
• simple and powerful configuration system.
• easy document mode, almost ascii.
• automatic wordwrap and reformat, even inside quoted line within a e-mail file.
• small, fast, powerful, low cpu consumer.
• hexdump-like mode to edit binary file.
• You can go everywhere with the cursor.
• Internal, fast file selector.

  Joe

  Joe editor -- The Joe editor has a set of command close to the WordStar, so it can be convenient to DOS old-timers who know this ancient command set. It was developed by Joseph H. Allen with assistance of Larry Foard and Gary Gray. It is a full featured UNIX screen-editor. Included in RH. Also available from ftp.std.com, file: src/editors/joe*.tar.Z. (ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/editors/joe2.8.tar.Z). It is also able emulate PICO ('jpico' version), but who cares ;-).

  Joe is lightweight (160K), text mode text editor and is not bad, but it's definitely not my favorite -- I do not like Wordstar command set.

  Key features:

  • Keybindings can be configured using joerc file, though.
  • Wordstar/Turbo-Pascal compatible block commands
  • primitive search/replace functions (no slicing)
  • It has (minimalistic) online-help (^ K H)
  • Can split the screen for editing multiple documents at once.
  • Can edit one file in several windows (link windoows feature)
  • You can envoke external program to act on the buffer content like in vi (^ K /)
  • Only one buffer for cut and paste
  • hooks for automatically compiling files
  • rudimentary bookmarks
  • If ispell is installed, it can be run on a document with a keystroke.

  joe is also quite configurable through its 'joerc' file. One can change almost every aspect of joe through this file including: status bar, keybindings, default behavior, help screen text and more. There are for example WordStar and Emacs 'rc' files included with distribution of joe (see the /usr/lib/joe directory).

  To make it a default editor one needs to include in /etc/profile the line
  "export EDITOR=joe"

  Additional information:

  • The Joe Editor -- A Quick reference Guide to the Joe Editor
  • Norman Matloff's Joe Editor Web Page
  • Joe Editor Commands
  • Using the Joe editor
  • Customizing the Joe editor
  • URM 207 - The Joe Text Editor on Project Vincent
  • Edit with JOE Page

Other GUI-based with ad-hos created macro languages

• XEmacs A graphically enhanced version of the Emacs (Lisp-like macro language).
• xcoral -- Text editor for X. Uses menus, key bindings and colors. A C-style macrolanguage (SMAC -- SMall Ansi C interpreter). It has several modes to edit C, C++, Java, Latex, HTML, Perl, Ada,C, C++, Java, Latex, Perl and more. A multiwindows mouse-based text editor for the X Window System. A built-in browser enables you to navigate through C functions, C++ classes, methods, and files. The editor has a nice user interface and an extensive online help system.
• Crisp Editor 2.2e This is the public domain version which preceeded the current commercial version. This is an updated version, which includes some bug fixes and a working X version. Included in Caldera distribution.
• Scriptum - Slick programmer's editor with class browser
• xwe, editor developed by Fred Kruse. Included into the Borland style IDE xwpe.

Rather Strange Unix-based Super-Lightweight Editors

• pico-- a simple text-editing program created and maintained by the Computing & Communications group at the University of Washington. Mapping of commands to keystrokes does not resemble any DOS/Windows editor. The basic features are text entry, searching, spelling checker, file browsing, and paragraph justification. Very strange interface. I do not recommend using it -- mcedit is much much better...
  • Pico Tutorial
  • PICO 101 - An Introduction to PICO Text Editing
• nano -- a better version of pico

Etc

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History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

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Last modified: January, 26, 2021