Best Text Editors for Linux - Page 2

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

GNU nano was designed to be a free replacement for the Pico text editor, part of the Pine email suite from The University of Washington. It aimed to "emulate Pico as closely as is reasonable and then include extra functionality". The Debian GNU/Linux distribution, known for its strict standards in distributing truly "free" software (i.e. software with no restrictions on redistribution), would not include a binary package for Pine or Pico. Many people had a serious dilemma: they loved these programs, but the versions available at the time were not truly free software in the GNU sense of the word. GNU nano is a small and friendly text editor. Besides basic text editing, nano offers features like undo/redo, syntax coloring, interactive search-and-replace, auto-indentation, line numbers, word completion, file locking, backup files, and internationalization support. Starting with version 4.0, nano no longer hard-wraps an overlong line by default.

A community-driven Emacs distribution. The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim! Spacemacs is a new way to experience Emacs, a sophisticated and polished set-up focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency. Key bindings are organized using mnemonic prefixes like b for buffer, p for project, s for search, h for help etc. Innovative real-time display of available key bindings. Simple query system to quickly find available layers, packages and more. Similar functionalities have the same key binding everywhere thanks to a clearly defined set of conventions. Community-driven configuration provides curated packages tuned by power users and bugs are fixed quickly.

API is first-class, discoverable, versioned, documented. MessagePack structured communication enables extensions in any language. Remote plugins run as co-processes, safely and asynchronously. GUIs, IDEs, web browsers can, embed Neovim as an editor or script host. Works the same everywhere, one build-type, one command. Modern terminal features such as cursor styling, focus events, bracketed paste. Built-in terminal emulator and strong defaults. Fully compatible with Vim's editing model and Vimscript v1. Start with :help nvim-from-vim if you already use Vim. The current stable release version is 0.5 (RSS). See the roadmap for progress and plans. With 30% less source-code than Vim, the vision of Neovim is to enable new applications without compromising Vim's traditional roles. Lua is built-in, but Vimscript is supported with the most advanced Vimscript engine in the world (featuring an AST-producing parser).

jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Hundreds of macros and plugins available. Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature. Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode. Highly configurable and customizable. Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor.

gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features.

CudaText is a cross-platform text editor, written in Object Pascal. It is open source project and can be used free of charge, even for business. It starts quite fast on Linux on CPU Intel Core i3 3GHz. It is extensible by Python add-ons, plugins, linters, code tree parsers, external tools. Syntax parser is feature-rich, from EControl engine. Syntax highlight for lot of languages (270+ lexers). Code tree structure of functions/classes/etc, if lexer allows it. Code folding, multi-carets and multi-selections. Find/Replace with regular expressions. Configs in JSON format. Including lexer-specific configs. Tabbed UI, with a split view to primary/secondary, and a split window to 2/3/4/6 groups of tabs. Command palette, with fuzzy matching, minimap, and micromap. Shows unprinted whitespace and offers support for many encodings. Customizable hotkeys. Binary/Hex viewer for files of unlimited size (can show 10 Gb logs).

It also includes a special .yedit2 file format, which is password-protected. You can put all your web logins, email accounts, etc in yEdit and then save them out in a password-protected file. (The contents of your files are not sent to, nor viewable by, Spacejock Software, and there is no magical backdoor to open your files if you lose your password.) There's also an Android version on the play store, currently available in public beta, and an iOS version is on the way. Due to play store/app store regulations, mobile versions will not have file encryption.

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris. Bluefish 2.2.12 is a minor maintenance release with some minor new features. Most important is a fix for a crash in a simple search. Python 3 compatibility has been further improved. Encoding detection in python files has been improved. Triple-click now selects the line. On Mac OSX Bluefish deals better with the new permission features. Also using the correct language in the Bluefish user interface is fixed for certain languages on OSX.