can anyone recomend a alternative that is easy to install and also offers syntax highlighting? i have read about lazyvim and neovim, but both have extensive install requirments as i have read
If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
https://www.lazyvim.org/installation
Then run `LazyExtras` and you get a prompt that shows things like:
Recommended Languages: (2)
○ lang.docker mason.nvim nvim-lspconfig nvim-treesitter none-ls.nvim nvim-lint
○ lang.toml nvim-lspconfig
[lang.docker and lang.toml are examples of things you're selecting, the list after is what is being installed and configured for that thing]
For things like integrating a debugger, or to run your tests directly inline from the editor might require more customisation though.
For GUI, Zed is also really nice, has a great Vim mode, and auto-installs anything you might need. It loses a couple of points to VS Code on account of not being arbitrarily extensible, although that can also be seen as a plus, as it prevents extensions from randomly slowing everything down.
[1] https://zed.dev/
For the terminal, micro is nice if you're used to GUI editors.
A few niggles with the switch, like it seems to assume Git but I'm using Fossil. I also haven't found a decent cheat-sheet for keyboard controls. I got duplicate block and move block working, and really enjoy the column editing, but still using cut for line delete.
I think KWrite is the same engine underneath? at least it feels much akin to Kate. I use it mainly for assembly files, since I was able to hack in an armv8 syntax file and needed a different theme than Kate.
Anyway Zed is a good option.