Linux @lemmy.world gmhh @lemmy.world 2 mo. ago

Looking to get away from Sublime; Sell me on your favorite non-modal text editor!

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.

28 comments

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.
I haven't used it but Zed seems like what you might be looking for.

Here's what I know:

Open Source

Runs natively on Mac and Linux (no Windows support yet)

Made by the same folks who made Atom

It's a little new but It looks like it's worth a try
- 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
Looks like jEdit just had a new release! I actually used it as my main editor 15 years ago before I sat down to learn Emacs. I thought it was pretty good back then.

Lapce is a newer one that looks interesting, though I haven't tried it. The page says modal editing can be toggled.
- 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
Kate is great, just make sure you go through its settings and turn on all the features you would need.
Zed's pretty new on the scene, but it's worth a look
- Helix also, but aren't ~~Zed~~ and 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.
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.
Kate, it takes some time to configure though
VS Code and its open sourced equivalent Code, are both excellent editors
Zed, VSCode If you like Vim, try Helix

You've viewed 28 comments.