There are a myriad of command shell based text editors for Unix operating systems. They were conceived by hard core geeks doing serious application development. This doesn’t quite fit the needs of a contemporary Linux desktop user or even a Mac user who just needs to do some simple editing of system files.
NE – short for “nice editor” is made for the humble desktop user. It is what you would get if you made notepad run on Linux, run in the command shell and if you added a few more features.
It uses CUA ( Windows/DOS ) keyboard shortcuts AND has menus, drop down menus. The commands are labeled what you would expect them to be labeled. It is small, takes little space on your hard drive, is very fast and runs on just about every kind of Unix, including Cygwin:
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I still use Emacs. Yes, since the 1970’s. On Linux boxen, it can either run in a text window or create it’s own GUI windows. It has all the features it had in the 70’s and more. On Windows, i’ve gravitated towards UltraEdit. It has macros and regular expressions for search and replace. And honestly, that’s what i use in Emacs. I never really made the jump when the extension language changed from TECO to Lisp, despite having written stuff in Lisp and Scheme. I do compiles with make, and jumping to errors in Emacs still. Yes, i’ve used Eclipse. But an editor should be able to launch in less than 8 GB of RAM, say on a Raspberry Pi zero (.5 GB RAM).
On Linux, there are a few notepad equivalents – i’ve gravitated to gedit. I could do it in Emacs, but even with X-Windows, copy and paste in gedit works like it does in other apps. At work on Linux, Emacs isn’t available, and i’m not allowed to install it. I’m stuck with vi. At least it’s really Vim, so without the original line length limitations and so on. I used to teach vi, so it’s not really a big deal.
I still edit html in notepad. All of the html “editors” i’ve seen mangle the formatting, making the html more difficult to read. I’d say Microsoft invented this idea, but the evidence is spotty.