I purchased a license for Sublime a few years ago, when I seriously thought that the way forward for me was to continue working in IT. That didn’t play out, so I’m now free to expunge one more piece of proprietary software from my life.
I’ve spent literally years at a time with modal text editors as a job requirement, and I know that I just don’t work well with them. This is not to say that Vim and Emacs are anything less than excellent. This is a me problem and not a them problem.
The editors I’ve found that have worked best for me in the past are probably Textmate and Sublime. Notepad++ runs a close third, and there is a Linux port these days!
The one thing I will not do is Electron-based editors. Besides the enormous resource usage of having a browser instance fired up for them, I’ve had malware try to coopt the JS backends of Electron text editors in the past. (On an interesting short-term contract gig cleaning malware out of websites.) It’s left me pretty gunshy, and I don’t need extra stress.
I’ve been down the lists of editors at certain wikis, and experimented with several of them. Kate seems like the best GUI editor and Micro seems like the best terminal-based editor.
However, I’ve been living in a relative vacuum on this subject for more than a decade and would appreciate others’ opinions.
I vote Kate
Yeah, once in a while I get the idea that I should be using a ‘fancier’ text editor and go off and try something else, but I always end up back using Kate again. It does just what I need and doesn’t get in the way, which is pretty ideal for me.
Well, uh, mine is Kate. Not sure, if you need much selling on that, then.
I use it with an LSP server to provide highlighting and refactorings for Rust. Other languages are available.
The project-wide search & replace feature is really useful. It’s available from the bottom bar.
In the settings, you can activate the “Filesystem Browser” plugin, which I sometimes prefer compared to the Projects view or the Documents view.
You can search for features with Ctrl+Alt+i.
In general, though, it’s lightweight and easy to use. It’s not going to win an award for a riveting new usage concept, which is why I like it.
Is emacs considered a modal editor?
it’s more of an operating system with a text editor included :p
usually, yes. It can be used almost amodally, especially if you use the GUI interface, but there are some pretty important features that just can’t be used without switching modes
Typically modal refers to insert/normal mode.
Mode in terms of the file type is fairly standard across all editors.
So Emacs, VScode, Vim and Pycharm are the obvious choices.
Geany and Kate are options but they’re not as nice to use.
See generally helix and zed.
According to whom? It has no fucking beep mode, it’s just there.
It has modes, but that doesn’t make it modal.
Yeah, normally the emacs/vi difference is considered to be “emacs is modeless, vi is modal”.
That being said, it is true that basically all software is somewhat modal in limited senses.
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Any software that can throw up an error dialog or similar has the “mode” where the dialog is present, where behavior is different. Emacs effectively does that, can ask to confirm some actions. I assume that that’s not what he’s talking about.
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Caps Lock is a “mode” for text entry that’s normally OS-wide and which I think all text editors I’ve ever seen subsequent to . I assume that’s not what he’s falling about.
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Emacs has multi-key commands. Think of hitting
C-u. That mode doesn’t go away just because you’ve lifted your hands from the keyboard. Maybe that’s what he’s thinking of, because most Windows and Mac software doesn’t do that. Though on Windows, tapping the Alt key normally is modal OS-wide for menus, unless things have changed. -
Emacs permits changing input method, which is a form of mode. Most software does this at the OS level.
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Emacs has an application-level read-only flag for buffers, which is a form of mode. Most editors don’t have that.
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There are Emacs’ “modes”, but like you, I assume that that’s not what he’s thinking of, because you don’t typically go cycling among them. I mean, if I edit an XML file, I’m in one mode, but other editors that support multiple formats will do something similar, even if they don’t call it a mode.
I honestly don’t really know what OP is thinking of when he’s saying that emacs is occasionally modal and he doesn’t want that modality, though. Might be one of the above, might not be.
He says that using the emacs GUI interface is a factor, which confuses me even more, because I can’t think of a way in which that is potentially a factor in emacs modal interface at all.
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i’m using Zed and it’s really good at this early stage on Linux, you can avoid the AI stuff easily. only bad things i guess is that the extended ecosystem has obviously not had time to grow in the same way as vscode, just for time reasons
Zed’s web page seems to come down pretty heavily on the pro-LLM side of things. Do you know if that can be toggled off or not?
It seems all AI stuff happens through the “Assistant Panel” and nothing is sent as long as you don’t interact with it.
It seems you can disable the assistant feature it is opt-out though
Lapce is definitely going on my to-experiment-with list.
KDE’s Kate is pretty awesome
Every time I try to do the same thing I just end up renewing my Sublime. I’ve spent hours configuring and trying other editors and I just can’t do it in the end - Sublime is so fast, productive, bloat-free, and perfect. I’ll be watching this though for next time, because I know I’ll try again at some point. Good luck!
Sublime’s speed is the main thing that keeps me, it’s so smooth unless I’m editing 10k lines at once
Zed’s pretty new on the scene, but it’s worth a look
Helix also, but aren’t
Zedand Helix both modal?edit: Huh. I just tried out Zed and looks like modal editing is optional.
Helix is, but I don’t think Zed is? At least not by default. It has a command palette and multi-buffer, multi-cursor, but not visual/normal/nsert/etc AFAIK
Helix looks interesting, but it won’t work for me for some of the same reasons that Vim doesn’t. Again, my calcified brain’s problems and not a problem with those interfaces.
My limited understanding is that Helix’s dev(s?) actually did work on Vim’s codebase and want to put what they learned there to good use.
Kate is great, just make sure you go through its settings and turn on all the features you would need.
I use zed, I switched very quickly. Functions well enough.
I tried sublime but I very quickly moved to vim. If you don’t like using the keyboard for everything, you can enable mouse support.
VS Code and its open sourced equivalent Code, are both excellent editors
Kate, it takes some time to configure though
Zed, VSCode If you like Vim, try Helix
