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Comment by patrickmcnamara | Hacker News Reader

I do wish there were more modal, terminal-based text editors that weren't so similar to Vim.

Kakoune is Vim-like, and now this.

> modal

Bill Joy: “One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.”

“People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore.”

Oh, I so disagree. Modal editing is not about the modes.

In a text editor, user input either writes text to the file or does something else. Every text editor let you write to files so aside from aesthetics, it's the everything else that makes each different. If keystrokes for writing are not separated from keystrokes for everything else, everything else is confined to awkward ctrl- and alt- key combos. That's why it's a good idea to put them in different 'modes' so you can perform other actions comfortably. You don't need more modes than 2. Actually, in vim, you could see command mode and the visual modes as extensions of the normal node. Modes are really just a metaphor.

I on the other hand would like to see other non-modal editors. Vim is already the best and most customizable modal editor, but does anyone know a good non-modal editor beyond basic nano?

You can try micro: https://micro-editor.github.io/

> Vim is already the best and most customizable modal editor

Weird statement. "Best" is up to debate, but "most customizable" is definitely Emacs.

I cannot really imagine a really good non-modal programmer's editor. Surely it should behave differently when editing Python compared to editing HTML?

You're using the emacs definition of major modes. "Modal editor" has a different meaning. Vim has three modes [1]. Emacs is not considered a modal editor, but some of its features are similar to Vim's last-line mode.

[1] https://alvinalexander.com/linux/vim-vi-mode-editor-command-...

Run Emacs in Evil mode or similar and you get modal editing inside a special editor mode. If anything, Emacs is an extra-modal editor. :)

Emacs is IDE, like Eclipse or Idea. It contains text editor, of course, but it much more than just text editor. It's not fair to compare say GEdit and Eclipse in terms of configurability, because GEdit is text editor, while Eclipse is IDE.

mcedit (part of mc) in gnome-terminal currently the best non-modal editor, AFAIK, especially when you like to use mc to navigate file system.

What an unfortunate name. All search results are for the Minecraft editor.

It's also fairly obtuse for non-experts. A champion non-modal editor would have a learning curve as shallow as nano but more depth that could reveal itself over time.

It predates Minecraft by about a decade, I think.

I've been using Joe's Own Editor the past couple of years when I want to do basic view/editing in terminal (I use Sublime Text for development). Really like it because it provides syntax highlighting for a ton of file types, let's me get around with arrow keys/mouse, and gives me an easy way to look up keyboard commands I may have forgotten.

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io

You can install it with your OS's package management system, and there's a Windows installer on the site.

I did adjust some of the default settings, which are configured and well documented in a .joerc file.

Do you know about micro? https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

It is indeed quite amazing how modal editing is usually defined by vi, which does so in very specific ways, when there are alternatives (like kakoune) which really show there's a whole spectrum of possible implementations of that idea. I wish there was a modal editor with the same scope as nano which would help introducing that concept to newcomers without aiming to maximize productivity / expressiveness.

Well, nano is modal. If you press CAPS LOCK you enter "uppercase mode" :)

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