Me giving advice about text editors

Once you try Vim you will never use another text editor. Or any other program for that matter because you won't be able to exit.

I also had that experience with emacs, which has a built in help system. I couldn't find a topic on 'exit' or 'quit' and refused to just search online.

Took me half an hour.
- and refused to just search online
  
  Unless you were f*cked by your ISP as I am right now, that's having some balls. Or being masochist. But nothing in between
- I'm editor bilingual but im a bit rusty in Emacs, so skill check: its C-x C-c right?
What are you running MS-DOS? laughs in multi-tasking.

I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.
- I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.
  
  I see what you did there. Lol.
Emacs

If I wanted to hear about what's good about Vim, should I:

a) ask what's good about vim

-OR-

b) assert blindly that there is nothing good about vim so fanboys will come crawling out of the walls tripping over each other to tell me how I'm wrong?

Doesn't matter we will tell you either way.

Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses "chords". Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.

Because of this there's no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.

this let's me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.

* I use "intuitively" here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.
- Thank you for telling me all this neat stuff! :D
  
  I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word "intuitively"; it's that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
  
  Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it...!
  
  Honestly that sounds cool ^_
- It's intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you're using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

It's extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it's incomprehensible to newbies. It's focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.

These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.

For example:

w is a movement command that moves one word forward.

You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so 3w moves three words forward.

d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes the next three words.

f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So f. will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.

Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing d2f.

Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think "I wish there was a better way to do this" there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).

It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to ~~salvation~~ efficient editing.
- I'm not against that,
  
  But if ctrl+f doesn't let me type a search term then I'm going to scream
  
  The war could have been avoided if user had the option to easily rebind any key/action
You shouldn't talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.
- Don’t use Microsoft’s version. Use Vscodium! :)
- I've seen vscode fill up home directories unnecessarily when run on the machine directly as well as remotely!
  
  IMO vscode is a perfect example of recent software that looks great from a features pov but horrible from an efficient implementation pov. I loved it until I hated it.
- It does have a vim plugin, so it's a perfectly fine editor
To add to your line of query, what if I don't give a shit about writing code and I just use Linux as a casual laptop user? I've never looked at vim or emacs, I use Kate and OnlyOffice
- Depends on how much you write. At some point the efficiency gain is probably worth learning vim anyway, but Kate is a nice editor and does the job.
  
  I just like vim, it feels nice.
Vim has been around long enough that I've found anything I want to figure out how to do has been discussed many times on various places around the internet and have yet to fail to find what I'm looking for with a search.
They're both fine choices.

nano just works for me man

Getting used to vim has made nano unusable for me. The muscle memory is too strong. That and all of the regex and plugin features (ex. LSP) are just too useful.
- I had the same experience. Nano is great if you’re used to notepad or a generic, limited text editor.
  
  Once you learn a terminal editor like eMacs or vim, why go back? So much less hand motion going to mouse, arrows, and back.
- Only a Vim user can call RegEx an advantage
I liked Micro just a little bit more than Nano
- I tried Micro and I found that its just Nano with a better interface and much easier to use. Its great actually but I like the vim movements.
- first time hearing about it gota give it a try

Vim is a puzzle based text editor

Exactly, it is lovely. Editing text with it is actually enjoyable.
- The dopamine rush when you nail a complicated %s regex search-and-replace first try is insane
Performing all those whacky movements and operations is nothing short of an arcade gaming experience.
Funny you should say that, because...

https://vim-adventures.com/

alias vim="nano"

alias vim=nvim
alias vi=nvim
alias nano=nvim
alias emacs=nvim
alias code=nvim

export EDITOR=nvim
export VISUAL=nvim
export PAGER=nvim
- You forgot
  
  alias v=nvim

Helix <3

vanilla helix is so nice, the keybindings make so much more sense and it feels really comfortable
Yeah hx. It was hx that finally made me use vi style navigation and now I choose vim over nano almost always.
- I'm halfway between hx and vim, I vastly prefer the helix/kakoune philosophy of selection, then action over vim, but I'm dearly missing plug-in support for Helix

I do everything with cat, sed and awk.

Fuck your TUIs.

But how do you write your awk script?

This, but Emacs

This, but Emacs
- Nooo not the pinky ! :(
- (setq evil-mode 'pinky)
With evil installed
- HELL naw
- Might as well just use Vim then
- Yo, so Evil on Emacs is just vim keybindings, right? What's DOOM Emacs?

Anytime I open Vim I ask the same question.

"how the fuck do I use you?"

then go back to nano

repeat.

Have you tried micro? Nano but better.
- Have you tried GUI text editors? They're like the CLI ones, just from this millennium. We're no longer etching runes into rocks any more either.
- Accurate. The keyboard shortcuts just make sense and it's full of features from this millennia. Like control click for multi cursor, automatic syntax highlighting, and automatic lint indicators.

Still don't like it.

Repeat as necessary.
- qa Ienjoy<ESC>q 200@a
- Why would I subject myself to unnecessary suffering?

NANO GANG RISE

for everything else, there's sublime.

I tend to work on customer systems where I'm not allowed to install anything. I've yet to encounter one that doesn't have vi installed, but I've seen a few without nano.
- vi is part of the POSIX standard, so it'll be available in some form on almost anything UNIX-flavoured
If you like Sublime, you're gonna love Micro.

Genuinely took most of my notes in college on vim, when you get good it’s just faster.

I'm sure someone already made a graph plotting the hours wasted learning vs the seconds gained not moving your mouse.
- This. If it was your sole tool for daily tasks it makes sense, once a month to edit a config file...not so much.
  
  When I started working we had HP Unix Silicon Graphics systems, VI was our only text editor...so I have some commands as muscle memory. The rest of commands I open my tractor feed help printout from 30 years ago

I've no choice coz I haven't been able to quit for last 7 years.

Also; Don't use vim.

Yeah, neovim is better
- 😂
- i haven't tried it but I'm sick of ubuntu being years behind on vim versions, what's good about neovim?

Is the whole point of this community to repost tired old memes or are ya'll just painfully uncreative?

:q!

The only Dad advice you nerds need:

mcedit from the Midnight Commander (mc) tool is the superior text editor.

I don't even run arch, btw.

I'm a simple man. I see midnight commander, I think 'dang, I need to use it more, stop calling me out'
I remember when the GNOME file manager was this kind of interesting hybrid that used MC for the backend. The one thing I liked about it was that it could be docked in Window Maker. Yep I was using a Dock in GNOME waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before most GNOME users.

Nowadays it's still possible to replicate my old Window Maker desktop in XFCE.
Ok, let's try that

FIrst

Ok, that is already more storage space than openwrt needs to run a full linux distro

root@proxmox:~# mc mytestfile.txt

Esscuse me, the fuck is this !?
- You're looking at the full mc package rather than just mcedit. Even then, Midnight Commander is absolutely worth that whopping 7.9MB of space it takes for all the functionality it provides.
  
  Openwrt is not an example to use to compate against a package size, as it's target built to fit into small firmware storage spaces on all sorts of random hardware. That's comparing existential philosophy with oranges.
  
  Would you download a car?

Sudo apt install AGAIN!

reinstalling all packages... removing ace-of-penguins... installing ace-of-penguins... removing apt... installing apt... error: apt does not exist! dispose of computer.
bash: found the mobile user
- This incident will be reported!

How did these people have "text editor wars" and yet failed to deliver a text editor half as good as microsoft's edit.com ?

I'm sorry nano, you're think you're hot ?

But you put search on CTRL+W !!!

Do you know how stupid that is ?

Just go and try that in your browser ...

Just use Micro

I'll stick with my trusty Emacs (and Zile)

emacs is a fantastic operating system, but it lacks a good editor.

In the meantime I'm happy with Kate.

Aw, I'm sure she's happy with you too . ❤️
I knew she was cheating on me
I'm too used to using notepad++ that I would rather use Kate than learn how to properly use vi(m).
- Geany feels more like Notepad++ than Kate does.
- Notepadqq on linux
She plays "Wipeout" on the drums
The squirrels and the birds come
Gather around to sing the guitar
Oh, I... Have you got nothing to say?

I'm gonna laugh my ass off if someone finds out there was some obscure Emacs fork or clone designed to run Clojure or something, and it's named Again

I know you didn't ask, but you don't need a weird fork of emacs to run a Clojure REPL, that just works in regular emacs
- this guy gets it. there are dozens of us

May I introduce you to our Savior Helix?

What about notepad++ under wine?

Notepadqq is basically an exact clone of Notepad++ but native on Linux.

I used it for a good while before recently switching to Kate.
- Haven't heard about Notepadqq. How different is it from Kate?
I'm trying... I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd ringo.

there is no text editor there is only nano

You're entitled to your wrong opinion

ed is the standard text editor.

If you don't like Vim, you should stop being a milk-drinking sweetroll-eating WUSS

But I love both vim and milk 🥺🥺🥺
I'll always upvote well-placed Elder Scrolls trash talk, n'wah. Now gimme back my sweet roll, fetcher!

...Also yeah I should attempt to learn Vim again lol.

Neovim >

I like evil/spacemacs because I can get my vim fix virtually, because emacs from a software engineering perspective is beautiful!

I can't try again because I can't exit out ...

It's a common problem but the correct solution to closing vim is quite easy, press and hold control alt and F5 to drop to a new terminal. From there you can do "killall vim" to properly close vim, then just drop back to your main session
- I wish I'd read this years ago! I've nearly bankrupted myself buying a new machine each time, thanks!
Just type :!bash (or whatever heathenous shell you prefer) and you never have to leave the warm embrace of vim ever again
Good, you still can get it right on the first try then