The Tilde Text Editor
os.ghalkes.nl
os.ghalkes.nl
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/
Standard keystrokes and mouse support! On the console, without X!
Either of those alone would be enough, but both together is a killer combination.
https://linux.die.net/man/8/gpm
But even if you do that, in basically all other existing Linux console editors, from Vim to Nano to Joe to Pico or whatever, your mouse doesn't work because they don't understand mice.
Tilde does.
But... on the console, with no X11? Really? I'm sure Vim didn't last time I tried. Not that it has much UI to operate with a mouse.
Emacs has a similar setting.
I personally think modal editors should have died by the 1980s, and am firmly with the late great Larry Tesler, who said "Don't Mode Me In". His personalised numberplate read NOMODES.
Emacs could be OK for non-Emacs types with some modernisation, and the best step in that direction is ErgoEmacs:
Since about 1987 there has been one standard UI language for normal desktop apps, and all major OSes follow it, including almost all Linux graphical desktops. It's called IBM CUA.
I started playing with computers in about 1981 and working with them in 1988. I learned dozens of weird editors and UIs back then, on dozens of OSes, from CP/M and VMS to RISC OS and GEM and AmigaOS and Concurrent DOS and SIBO and EPOC16 and so on.
It was a massive relief when CUA came along and swept them all away.
Sadly this didn't happen to the command-line Linux world.
I am not a programmer; I'm a writer. I don't want syntax highlighting or any of that. I want to edit English text. All the fancy features of Vim and Emacs are 100% totally useless to me, and so I am not willing or interested in learning their horrible 1970s UIs just to get at features for programmers that I don't want or need.
It is over 35 years since there was a standard UI for editors.
Any editor whose developers want me to try it must comply 100% with CUA, including the same menu names accessed with the same keystrokes.
So: no Emacs or Vim for me.
Which means: if they need fancy options to support a mouse, and it doesn't work out of the box, that means that for me, it doesn't work.
But I am happy to hear it can be enabled.
What I like about Tilde is that it's small, fast, free, has the standard UI, and it works with a mouse with zero extra configuration.
For me, that means 5 ways that it beats both Emacs and Vim put together.
Although I used `vi` on SCO Xenix in 1988, I thought it had died with proprietary xNix and that only a few lunatics still used it in the 21st century -- like a few diehards still run Classic MacOS or Amigas these days.
How wrong I was.
It is very hard to understand people's deep affection for what to me is a crufty old piece of relatively early computing history, and possibly #2 or #3 in my personal list of Ugliest Editors I've Ever Seen.
But then, TBH, xNix as a crufty old piece of early computing history, and if we lived in a sane world, it would be mostly forgotten by now, an early intermediary step on the way to some modern polished descendant of Inferno, treating datacentres as single machines, everything CPU-independent, which nobody ran on their desktop but powered lots of servers. C should be as dead as Plankalkül.
Me, I'd be running a modern Acorn-made machine with BeOS, and next to it an ARM Mac running a re-engineered hybrid of LisaOS and Copland with apps written in Dylan. Maybe some strange IBM OOPS OS that grew out of Taligent for business stuff.
But we don't live in a sane world. People assimilate software as culture, identifying with it, with the result that they keep re-implementing obsolete 1960s designs, ignoring their better successors, clinging to ugly hacks because they're ugly.
1. vi is not vim
2. vim has support for LSP. IOW, it's very modern compared to what you've seen.
Chuckle
It's really not.
Here is a story I wrote in June about Vim 9.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/30/vim_9_is_here_with/
I am 100% talking about right now, the current versions that most distros ship with.
I never tried ee, though, so I have no idea how it compares or if anyone uses it.
That's the thing. Everyone still things it's OK on xNix to just invent your own keystrokes. It is not OK. There has been a standard for over one-third of a century now and every mainstream OS, including most Linux GUIs, follows it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
I think that these days people just don't know how to operate a GUI with a keyboard, which is why so many Linux GUIs are inaccessible to blind users.
If you can't see, you can't use a mouse. You can't see where it's going.
But computers are extremely valuable to blind users: they can read for you.
By ignoring keyboard access, FOSS OSes are excluding blind users, who could be among their most valuable and passionate supporters... because blind people tend not to be rich and tend not to have much disposable income.