Finally! A decent text editor for Linux with Windows key bindings.
I’ve been using Linux for more than 7 years now. The main thing I do on Linux is text editing. Editing configuration files, source files, html files and what not. Initially I used Midnight Commander’s built-in editor (as probably many of you coming from windowed systems). As I became more experienced and geeky I moved to one of the ‘holy editors’: Vim. Vim is an excellent editor with unlimited possibilities but unfortunately mastering it takes unlimited time as well. I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.
Here’s what I was looking for:
- as many windows-like (CUA) key bindings as possible. At least Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
- syntax coloring
- basic editing functions like search&replace
- needs to work on a VT as well as a console without rebinding keys
- minimum configuration
These features are not particularly demanding, are they? Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos.
Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box. I’m not going into details (you can read about its features on the homepage), just a screenshot and a list of pros and cons.
Pros:
- very windows-like key bindings (all that I use, I didn’t rebind a single key!)
- no configuration needed (although you can configure it pretty extensively if you want to)
- works on a VT as well as console without reconfiguring putty, .inputrc or anything
- has all the features you would expect in a basic programmers editor (regexps, etc)
Cons:
- It’s slow. It is really slow when compared to any other editor (even Emacs). It’s written in Ruby, which is an interpreted language. I’m not sure if it is for Ruby or the author’s laziness but I don’t really care. It works sufficiently fast on my hardware. It saves a lot of my time which is more valuable to me than cpu cycles.
- Syntax coloring has some problems. I think it has something to do with switching contexts. When editing a PHP file with HTML in it, the coloring sometimes gets funny. Well that’s not a major drawback for me too.
To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.
Filed under: Code Editing, Linux on 2007-05-03 by Damian Gawęda
try kate.i use it and it’s pretty fast.c++ ftw!! :p
http://www.kate-editor.org/
kuzux, I gave up using Linux on my desktop some time ago so Kate is not an option for me. I needed a console-only editor for editing stuff using putty.
Try nano, a really easy to use console editor. It’s installed by default on all distros, I think, and it’s fast as hell.
LimitedMage, speed and availability were not my primary concerns. Windows-like key bindings were. Nano may be fast but you can’t change its key bindings.
Hi, Damian. Thank you for the positive review of Diakonos!
I’m glad you were pleased by my “it just works” approach to designing and developing Diakonos. Indeed, my experiences with emacs and vi were frustrating, so I decided to take a stab at rolling my own editor.
I’ll be the first to confess that Diakonos is not fast [yet]. I will take 95% of the blame for that, and leave 5% for Ruby and other things. There are various algorithms and internal process approaches which could stand for refactoring. See this wiki page for tips on how to speed Diakonos up, though: http://wiki.purepistos.net/doku.php?id=Diakonos:Tips-and-Tricks:Speeding-Up-Diakonos
The multi-lingual syntax highlighting is a known issue. As a workaround, you can temporarily change the highlight language of the whole file with Alt-Shift-T. Change to ‘php’ or ‘java’ (for Javascript) when those are your embedded languages. Also, try playing with larger values for the view.lookback setting. This will make more demands on your hardware, but it may solve the highlighting problem in more cases than not.
If you have any feature requests or anything, feel free to drop me a line, either in IRC (chat.freenode.net #mathetes; or http://chat.purepistos.net ) or by e-mail at the e-mail address I used here on your blog. User interest and feedback always motivates me, and I value user feedback.
Thanks again for trying and using Diakonos!
I think Minimum Profit 5 (mp-5) is better.
It has all the windows keys bindings (ctrl-o, ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v …) it pretty fast, scriptable, and work with GTK and also with Ncursesw (console based).
home page: http://www.triptico.com/software/mp.html
if you use windows but still like to use kate, gedit, geany or some other graphical linux editor, just install XmingW , a free X window manager for windows. If you then log in using PuTTY,a nd check ‘ enable X forwarding’ option (same as using ssh -X ), you can start GUI-enabled programs from the putty console and they’ll show up as application windows in your MS WIndows session.