(Modified 2014 Apr 29)
Text editors
There were a few key features I was looking for in a text editor:
ease of installation/use
small size
ability to have multiple files open, be it via tabs and/or a split window
find-as-you-type search
optionally, a file-selection sidebar
For comparison, my favorite two Windows text editors are Notetab Light and OxEdit.
vi/vim/gvim
vi probably needs no introduction. I was interested in the enhanced version, vim, which has mouse support and split windows and context-sensitive coloring. There's a graphical version too, gvim, that has pulldown menus, which ought to be useful to people who can't remember the control characters.
Mouse control is off by default, so to turn it on, have this in your ~/.vimrc file:
set mouse=a
While vi may need no introduction, vi is notoriously user-unfriendly, so I've been working on a cheatsheet.
emacs
emacs is also well-known. It has a lot of features, way more than I ever plan to use. I have an old cheatsheet here.
jedit
jedit is in between a simplistic editor (such as mousepad) and a full-featured, bloated editor like emacs
jedit is configurable and offers plugins. Plugins I found useful include:
BufferList -- adds a side pane which lists open files -- Buffer Selector provides a similar functionality (and even looks nicer), but the tabs don't change appearance when cycling through open files.
BufferTabs -- each open file has a tab at the bottom of the window (by default, each open file is listed in a pulldown menu, such that you only see one filename)
Another customization I added was to bind SHIFT+F3 to Find Previous.
kate
kate has everything that I'm looking for: ability to split windows, find-as-you-type, a side bar with open files. The main downside is that it uses the KDE libraries. This doesn't preclude you from using kate on a non-KDE system, but it means that you're loading all of these libraries -- a 50MB download and 150+ MB on disk -- for a mere text editor.
Also, debugging messages are on by default, and a lot of unneeded information gets dumped to the console. As I learned from the KDE Community Forum, these aren't errors, and most can be suppressed by unchecking the kate-related options in kdebugdialog.
sublime
I recently installed sublime and am impressed so far. Unlike kate, it doesn't use KDE libraries. The one practical disadvantage is that there is a finite number of split-screen layouts. Also, sublime isn't open source. Installation instructions can be found at Ask Ubuntu. Briefly, from Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text
tea
tea is obscure, by some guy in the Ukraine. It is small, supports tabs, depends only on the GTK, is highly customizable, can display line numbers, and even has HTML markup capabilities. I'm not too keen on how the search field works though. My tea_rc file looks like:
#TEA editor configuration file. Please read the manual editor_font=Courier 10 Pitch 13 how_line_nums=1 tab_size=8
I haven't used it in a few years though, and I see that it's undergone changes. When I tried it now (in 2011), I got a libQtSvg.so.4 error.
Some other editors that I use:
geany is a nice, tabbed editor
nedit has the rare ability to select columns, and recent versions have tabs
mousepad has find-as-you-type
medit has a file selector and browser
gedit is somewhat big for what it does, but often the GNOME libraries are already running
Below are the text editors I experimented with and was dissatisfied, either because I didn't like them or couldn't install them. Keep in mind I may have given up quickly on the ones that didn't install right away, i.e., laziness prevailed. From smallest to largest:
codeeditor -- couldn't compile
mp -- froze when I tried it
aee -- poor man's vi
eddi -- dependency problem
eedit -- dependency problem
glimmer -- dependency problem
adie -- didn't like: no tabs
xcoral -- didn't like: no tabs
setedit -- dependency problem
wyoeditor -- dependency problem
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