Ne: the nice editor
ne.di.unimi.it
ne.di.unimi.it
Plus it's got some Emacs (s-lang) to it although I never use it.
Also, you can't argue with 8bit clean.
It's in the repos.
Homepage: http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/features.html
On a sidenote. I am addicted to Jedsoft's console pager "most". Also in the repos. With colour, search and really the whole nine yards. It's the most. So much more than more and even more than less!. Pipe to |most and see for yourself!
The question is: why didn't it replace the goddamn Nano as a default editor long ago? This editor should be known more widely.
JOE is already pretty simple (it says hit ^K H for help on the screen always, and if you hit it you get the basic commands), but even then I find that a top google search for JOE is "How do you save and exit?" People can't seem to see the "Hit ^K H for help" in the top-right corner. Also this message annoys power users since it's a waste of valuable status line real estate.
So I'm trying this for JOE 4.2: the pop-up copyright notice is replace with one-line of help:
JOE 4.2 ** Use Ctrl-K X to save/exit, Ctrl-C to abort, or Ctrl-K H for help **
ne and emacs both show this kind of help when you first start the editor. But in both cases, you have to do a lot of reading (emacs shows too much, and in ne the help is buried in the middle of a long copyright notice).
Ne is pretty nice otherwise, it almost has the Windows cua key bindings and includes column block operations. Of course JOE is better :-)
Was the Win32 build a one-time thing or do you see chances that the current (and future) versions will see a Win32 build, as well?
Are there technical difficulties? Is the Win32 work not applicable to the last version?
With that said, to console newbies - you have to try out 'joe' once. It uses the Unix dev environment fantastically and its not short on features either.
> if you're a student trying to write a first-year
> program, you don't want to waste time being hindered by
> the editor
I would see that as a very strong hint that the time when Wordstar keybindings made sense in an editor with "no learning curve at all" has passed.
I think you should very seriously consider either having control-S for save or dropping the idea to compete with editors without a learning curve. If you want to keep aiming at the low learning curve, Google tells me that key bindings are highly configurable, so what's wrong with shipping with ones beginning users will be familiar with?
If you want to keep Wordstar bindings by default, I think your new message can be improved.
I fear that people who read "Use Ctrl-K X to save/exit" may think that Ctrl-K X will give them the option to save changes, and then exit. That can put them up for a huge disappointment the first time they want to exit without saving.
IMO, the use of "abort" for "exit without saving" doesn't help there, either. For me, "abort" signals abnormal termination, but there is nothing wrong with exiting without saving.
Save file and Exit=Ctrl-K X Exit Without Saving=Ctrl-C Help=Ctrl-K H
I am pessimistic because I see three problems with Control-K X for 'normal' users:
- they aren't used to the tiny mode that Control-X introduces (it wouldn't even surprise me if interviewing a few 'normal users' would show that they do not know what "Ctrl-K X" means)
- most other applications separate the 'save' command from the 'exit' command (web and phone apps are exceptions, but they don't use explicit save at all)
- it's not control-S (unfair? Maybe, but I would call it realistic)
I doubt reminding them "hey, this program is different" at startup will help much for that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional in this field and I am wildly guessing at the target audience for a simple text editor.
Joe's Own Editor 4.1 (utf-8) ** Type Ctrl-K Q to exit or Ctrl-K H for help **(You should take the latest: it now supports Unicode languages).
Why not hide the message once the shortcut has been used a few times.
http://www.danielsays.com/ss-gallery-dos-the-norton-editor-1...
I have written so, so much code in this.
You have a clone of it bundled with Midnight Commander. "mcedit"
Common "text code editors" don't understand a thing about the code they edit. They're just supplemented with ton of hacks that produce meaningful result in acceptably high number of cases (like regex-based highlighters) but still don't have "real" intelligence towards the content of their buffers.
And with ever-growing number of hacks the thing's unlikely to be small or low on dependencies. You'll end up with another emacs/vim/etc - a fairly small cores, and then a scripting or external tool execution support to do highlighting, parsing, context-aware searching, refactoring etc etc to make them useful for code editing. (And then why bother when we have emacs and vim already?)
That's acceptable as long as it works.
And, well, if they don't work, it's certainly easier to patch their hacks or pile even more hacks, rather than trying to redo everything from a clean slate.
Some need to compile the program to work. (So they can't work if the code has compile time errors) Some still don't retrieve all the correct candidates for autocompletion.
Also, it's been awhile since I've tried a clang based plugin but I can't recall any of them controlling the syntax highlighting (eg. Show false #ifdef sections similar to comments) or providing a call tree or jump to caller feature.
I suppose you mean, "I can't backspace with my backspace key" -- as you probably can backspace fine with ^h (ctrl+h)?
Nano gets the job done for tweaking Web pages on ssh &c. It does have some fans...