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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Good old Nedit. I used that for two or three years over ssh with an X11 server running in Windows to do most of my development.

Nedit was very fast, had a familiar user interface (to a person raised on dos/windows) and still had a ton of functionality.

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I still use NEdit when I develop code. I don't like 1GB+ RAM IDEs like Eclipse or VSCode when I can get things done in a smaller text editor and a command line. I'll use vi for small edit jobs or quick text. NEdit comes out when I need to move code blocks around or need to compare.

Some of my co-workers said it was weird that I used it because the other editors will do instant linting and suggest code for Ansible YAML. I've found that not using VSCode or Eclipse forced me to learn more about the language and I am now the local subject matter expert on Ansible.

Moving blocks of text in NEdit is its best feature. Try doing the same in vim. That is an exercise in frustration.

I first learned NEdit at Fermi where it was developed. Been using it for 28 years now. Carrying a dependency on Motif for all that time has been sort of a drag, though.

In Vim? If I'm at the end of the block it's v?foo^Md/bar^Mp, which takes about a second. Emacs is similar, ^Rfoo^X^X^W^Sbar^M^Y, 10 keystrokes instead of 8, not counting the isearch strings, and more awkward chording in exchange for being less modal. Either is significantly faster than pointing at the block with the mouse, especially if part of it goes off the screen. Vim is the opposite extreme from being an exercise in frustration.

> v?foo^Md/bar^Mp ... the opposite extreme from being an exercise in frustration.

Master class in Unix user interface design right there.

You can't do that in vi. Vim is from the Amiga, not Unix. In vi you have to say d?foo^M/bar^Mp, and though that's less keystrokes, it's harder because you don't have the continuous feedback of v mode or incremental search. Isearch isn't from Unix either; it's from ITS Emacs and wasn't in vim. It was Jef Raskin who did the research to justify centering it as a navigational method by quantitatively demonstrating its superiority to the mouse.

Of course if you don't have Vim in your brain none of this text will make any sense to you; it's almost like reading a list of (x,y) coordinates if mouse clicks. So you won't have any idea about the UI feedback I'm talking about, and you're likely to make clueless sarcastic comments like the one I'm responding to. But you can easily remedy that ignorance by running Vim or Emacs on an appropriate file and typing the recommended keystroke sequences.

of mouse clicks

and wasn't in vi

Nedit lets you use the X secondary selection to do dual block operations.

You can do it with vim registers.

vim has a register for every letter. I.e., register a, register b, ...

So you can swap two non-adjacent blocks? When is that most convenient?

Emacs too. IIRC, you right click and drag.

Same here — found it in college in the mid-90s and it became my code editor of choice for years. I brought it back recently on some test machines just out of convenience and nostalgia.

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