Diving into the world of Free Text Editors
Vi, Vim, Neovim, AstroNvim, LazyVim, SpaceVim, LunarVim, Emacs, Spacemacs, Doom Emacs, Helix Editor, Lapce, Sublime Text, Lite, LiteXL, Atom, Pulsar, etc, etc, etc...
Lately I’ve been trying to find a perfect free text editor for myself.
Long story short, I use Neovim in Neovide GUI at the moment. With a custom config and some plugins. It’s not for everybody, since Neovim is a Terminal-based application. And Neovide doesn’t support much/any typical GUI menus, bells and whistles. You can’t really drag’n’drop stuff there and even saving happens by typing :w (colon+w) with keyboard.
But I really like the Vim world.
Maximum efficiency, once you learn the shortcuts.
Good alternative for Windows/Mac basic Notepad/Notes application is the cross-platform and light Brackets - Give it a shot, you might like it :)
I was a long-time Atom user, but once it got discontinued I tried its successor/fork Pulsar and started to think that it was way too bloated for a text editor for me, just like Atom used to be. The startup time was considerable, maybe even 10 seconds. That was a deal-breaker and a kick to finally start discovering a new alternative.
Next in line was Lite and LiteXL, the latter was better, but for Windows the Lite was kind of the only option from those two, and I didn’t like to use two different ones for multi-platform usage. Even though the applications were quite nice and light. Plus, I was starting to get into the Vim world already, which really got out of hand later.
I tried Lapce, which was light and nice, but seemed unfinished. Then a friend told me about Helix Editor, which works in Terminal, iTerm2 or Powershell and other of that kind. That was really addictive and worked super well pretty much out of the box. I considered it being superior to Vim, Neovim and Emacs at first. But decided to get some distance to it once I dived more into the world of the forementioned tried-and-true text editors.
Notepad++ wall quickly discarded because macOS and Linux wasn’t supported, it seems. I need a true all-rounded cross-platform text editor, installable anywhere. But I’ve heard some good stuff about it. Geany with the Vimode plugin is yet to be tested, but my instincts say it’s not super good, especially according to the description: “Vimode is a Vim-mode plugin for Geany written by a guy who does not use Vim. Expect problems unexpected by a Vim user…“.
For future, I shall keep an eye on Focus Editor, but for now it seems a tad too unfinished, still.
Emacs I tried quickly but haven’t done a proper full-on try-out with it yet. It even has some sort of Vim-mode, which could be interesting. I’m really in awe watching how fast this guy navigates in his text/code and edits it with Emacs. I have to roast him to make a video about his code-editing habits and setup for sure.
Sublime Text was also tried, with Vim shortcuts and all, but the application being share-ware and not being able to configure it exactly like I want to, I gave a shot for Neovim.
I had tried Neovim before very quickly, but realized one needs to put more time into it in order to get something out. This time I tried all the AstroNvim, LunarVim pre-configurations for it - but also realized that to have it work the fastest one needs to just install the Vanilla Neovim and configure just a teaspoonful of config lines to the init.lua file. To customize it only for myself. And the Neovide GUI for it makes it so wonderful to use with all its cursor’s stretch and particle animations (seen in the GIF image above).
I even ordered a HHKB (Happy Hacking Keyboard, US-layout (I’m Finnish)) just to get the original feel for using Neovim.
My Helix Editor/Neovim/Neovide configs can be found here: gearnoodle.com/helix
I may continue this article later, or may not - we shall see.
Cheers!
Oh, almost forgot about Brackets, that was quite nice cross-platform light text editor. If I wasn’t excited about Neovim/Neovide, Brackets might be my thing.
Manu Järvinen
gearnoodle.com