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Comment by hackaflocka | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason why a simple visual editor such as notepad++ cannot be used via the terminal (e.g., for Linux administration)? I'm trying to do some LAMP related server administration using vi and I cannot believe how many weird commands one has to learn to do simple text editor functions. It's also probably a hugely intimidating factor that prevents more newbies from moving to Linux.

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To do absolutely basic text editing, you really don't need to learn much at all:

i - enter insert mode. ESC - leave insert mode. ZZ - save and quit :q! - quit without saving.

Since, in insert mode, vim basically behaves like a simple notepad, that's really all you need.

FYI, if you want a "simple," notepad like editor for console on linux, check out nano.

http://www.nano-editor.org

I think most people would consider copy/paste and undo/redo to be included in "basic" text editing.

If the Linux community wants to attract more newbies, they need to come up with an easily "grokked" text editor.

There are plenty... nano/pico/joe if you want to work in the terminal (though who is trying to woo newbies with terminal based text editors?), and gedit/kate/kwrite in the GUI department. The idea that Linux is somehow floundering because only Vi and Emacs exist and those are difficult is absurd.

Perhaps the real question is do we want to attract more newbies? Why do we want to attract newbies? If more non-technical users are the solution to our problems, then why is Android (with their legions of newbies) such an absolute shitfest compared to traditional Linux distros?

Notepad++ isn't a terminal program. There are other terminal-based editors on Linux besides vim and emacs that have easier learning curves like pico and joe.

Linux sysadmin here - although I use vi for almost everything on the terminal, I still consider Notepad++ a "killer app" for Windows. It perplexes me that in all this time I have not been able to find anything comparable for Linux.

Games and Notepad++ are the only real reasons I have had for using Windows on my desktop instead of Linux.

The last time I used either (5 or 6 years ago), Kate seemed perfectly comparable to Notepad++.

http://kate-editor.org/about-kate/

It's "vi imitation" mode is shit though.

You can use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS

KDE used to have some built in remote editing stuff in Konqueror, I don't know if it's still there or got moved into Dolphin, or removed.

Have you tried nano?

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