Text editors which I use

Although for many a text editor is a scary beast, they belong to the most useful software for a hacker. It is interesting how different they may be to fulfill the needs of their users (it is why five text editors were used as a case study in Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming). In last two years I used the following text editors, ordered partly by the time spend with them:

1. GNU Emacs – described in its manual as ‘the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor’. Emacsen are the only editors programmed with their own Lisp dialect allowing very helpful support for users writing in many different programming languages, a mail client, a Web browser, several games and a psychoanalysis. A nice feature of Emacs is support for doing everything with keyboard only, using many modifier keys (that’s why its name is sometimes expanded as ‘escape, meta, alt, control, shift’). I haven’t heard also of any other text editor having its own religion. Emacs is very user-friendly, but its friends must spend much time learning it.
2. GNU Nano – a very simple to user text editor. It has most useful commands listed at the bottom of the screen, making learning its use as simple as writing nano foo to edit file foo. I use it for every administrative task for my other computers and for commit messages in version control systems (although Emacs has specific support for using a VCS).
3. vi (mostly Vim and Nvi) – the only well-known text editor with modes. Later I used it only when the above programs were unavailable. Before Emacs 22 I used Vim more due to its Unicode support.
4. ed – the line-editor with which Unix was written. I used it only once, to remove broken /usr filesystem from /etc/fstab in an older computer with FreeBSD. No other text editor was available, since they resided in the filesystem eaten by bad blocks on the disk. From this experience I know how helpful man pages may be.

Before these four I used GUI-based text editors (although both Emacs and Vim has nice GTK+ interfaces). They weren’t so interesting and required much more typing work. Then I used a mouse, the pain-bringing device required by such editors.