Editors are like religions, so at the risk of starting a holy war...

Vi and clones

By default (as of DebianPotato) the vi-clone installed is "nvi". This can be replaced by levee, which is a vi clone that offers a much smaller installation footprint and more economical resource usage, if required.

vim

You might prefer to install "["vim"]" as your vi-clone, or a different version of emacs, if that's what you're into.

If you install vim, an oft-overlooked package for people new to vim is vim-rt, the runtime files. They are necessary to do things like draw the menus, etc, in gvim and color your source code.

gvim

You can use the [wiki:GUI GUI] version gvim. To execute it, type

 gvim 

in a terminal.

Emacs

[:emacs:Emacs]. Some people think it is a mutated and bloated Lisp system trying to disguise itself as a text editor. However, today it is fast enough and once some commands have been learned it is quite powerful. Furthermore, there are auto-indent and syntax highlighting options for many file formats such as programming languages or ["LaTeX"], and config files such as ~/.muttrc and ~/.procmailrc. If you know Lisp, you can customize Emacs to any extent you like. I would advise to stick to verstion 20.x, since the 21.x -versions contain unneeded and annoying graphical "improvements" (on the other hand, there are ways to turn these "improvements" off; see "Notes"). In Debian, a version of ["emacs"] is installed by default.

Notes

Wish list

For those who find vi cryptic and emacs ugly or confusing, there are a variety of alternatives. "jed" (or "xjed") is a full-featured emacs-like editor with colour support menus, etc. Note, the testing release is much improved over the version in potato.

Nano


CategorySoftware