Which text editor do you use?
I miss atom, when it was discontinued I tried vscodium and immediately hated it, then used kate for a while, and now use neovim. neovim is nice but atom was just so good
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Hint: :q!
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Pulsar is the answer for you.
Yeah, but a lot less of the plugins are maintained now and teletype is gone
Google says Teletype for Pulsar exists.
None of them. I need a texteditor, not an unusable wannabe miracle machine for which you need documentation and a diploma just to exit it.
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(3 replies)
ed is the standard editor
It has an extremely consistent user interface and error reporting!
?
WYGIWYG
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(1 replies)
Man, I have wanted to learn Emacs for a while, but those shortcut keys kill my hands and soul in general. I know about Evil mode, but for whatever reason I just gotta use default controls when I play a new game. The graphics are terrible, but they say that the gameplay for emacs is pretty great. I guess you could say that Emacs is the Dark Souls of text editors.
What really helps for me is pressing control with the inside of my pinky knuckle, and alt with your thumb. That way your fingers can stay on the home row. If you have a very low profile keyboard or are on a laptop, best you can do is probably remap capslock to be control.
Let the editor holy wars (re)start!
Vim is the one true editor, and the heretics who claim otherwise shall be driven forth and sent to ~~re-education~~ linux boot camps to learn the true ways.
Comment could have been a :q!
Honestly, since I switched to vim and got through the first month of "why the fuck am I doing this to myself", I just can't go back. Especially once you get to customizing it, installing plugins, themes etc ... it's better than any IDE out there.
I'm a emacs guy, but nano should be the only one installed by default. The default editor should tell you how to exit!
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Came here to see my helix fam, was not disappointed.
I use Micro in the terminal - it offers good desktop integration with keys similar to DEs like ctrl+v and ctrl+c, rather than being terminal centred (e.g. Ctrl+C is usually the standard interrupt/abort key in the terminal). So it's nice if you're mainly in a desktop but pop in to a terminal occasionally and have the DE muscle memory.
I use Kate outside the terminal.
But honestly, which text editor you use depends on what you use it for and how often. Vim is very powerful and allows very fast use & productivity if you learn it properly and probably very useful if you spend a lot of time in the terminal or TTY, but Nano is more straight forward and easy for a lot of basic terminal based work.
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Do you need operating system? Select emacs
Do you want to be elite coder? Select (neo)vim
Do you need to just edit .conf files? Select nano
Nano/micro are great for people who need a terminal text editor but don't want to learn anything to use it.
If you do want to put some time into learning, it really doesn't take long to get to a point of base competency in emacs or vim -- less than an hour for sure to just be able to move around in the document and have a basic understanding of the editing controls.
Both are hugely deep systems that you can keep learning for years, but only at the pace that you need; most tasks can be accomplished pretty easily with a bunch of inputs, but there's usually a much faster way if you know the shortcuts.
As for the difference, vim is more modal -- you switch to editing mode, do some editing, then switch to typing mode and type. Most commands are one to three sequential button presses. For some more exotic functionality you use the command line to type a command, which has auto-complete.
On the other hand emacs is chorded, meaning you use multiple simultaneous keys to do functions, usually a modifier key like ctrl + something else. This gives you more direct power while actually typing, but IMO has a big steeper of a learning curve, and I just personally don't love the chorded inputs, I think they're more work to input than the sequences in vim. But either editor will give you unprecedented power over text with minimal fuss.
I personally use Helix, which is basically just a slightly different take on Vim, as well as taking inspiration from Kakoune which is another competitor. It's got really nice modern defaults and I like the way that Kakoune treats selections in contrast to Vim.
The "object-verb" of kakoune is much easier (to me) than "verb-object" of vim
I install micro. I intend to use micro. My fingers type nano anyways. Every time.
Time for an alias!
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Helix is really rad
serious question:
what are you using your text editor for that requires all these features?
i just hot down quick notes, maybe an address, quick and bare budget, or a short list of things.
the kind of things i thought people use text editors for.
more robust documents, libre office or word.
I'm not making a joke, I'm really wondering why it matters? isn't it just notepad or what am i missing?
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Nano, Micro, JOE, ee(1). Those are my suggestions.
Micro. What you are looking for is micro. It's great
Helix
sudo sed -i
xed
Suck it dorks!
This is kinda irrelevant for a new user, but vi/vim is available literally everywhere. If you need to shh onto another machine and edit some files, it's the only editor you can reliably expect to exist.
I'm too old to keep lying that I don't like nano..
pico!
But nano will do ;)