Choosing an editor

pandoc --filter pandoc-xnos -t html editor.md

We cannot emphasize enough how valuable a good (text) editor is. “A good editor” is, of course, subjective. That’s why we’re still fighting the Editor War Links to an external site., one of the Holy Wars of Computer Science.

We’ve already encountered the nano editor. A small editor that runs entirely in the terminal. An editor that runs in the terminal is an important tool, because you can use it in all terminal interfaces, e.g. on remote systems over SSH or systems which doesn’t have any graphical user interface (e.g.  servers).

However, in most cases you’ll be using the editor on your own system, which will usually have a graphical user interface (GUI). So it might be worth having two editors of choice.

Below we give a list of some commons editors, both terminal and GUI.

Editors for the terminal

As mentioned above, we’ve already encountered nano.

We also mentioned the Editor War, which is usually fought between vi (or newer Vim or NeoVim) on one side and Emacs on the other. Both of these run in the terminal, but they also have GUI versions.

You can access a tutorial on Vim by running vimtutor in the terminal. That’s the safest way to start with Vim, since many have problems to exit Vim Links to an external site.. Emacs offers the possibility to enter a tutorial when it’s started.

Yours truly Links to an external site., is in the Vim camp. So, if I should try to say anything objective about Vim vs Emacs, it’s that vi is available on every UNIX-like system by default. Emacs is only available by default on GNU/Linux systems, which is a subset of UNIX-like systems.

GUI-only editors

What people usually want when they go for a GUI editor is more of an integrated development environment (IDE). This brings a lot of tools to the same place.

Again, yours truly Links to an external site. uses only Vim in terminal mode. So it is possible to come a long way without a GUI. Vim (and Emacs) has support for syntax highlighting, code completion and integrated debugging through various plug-ins. There are even services which generate the configuration for Vim Links to an external site. based on your (programming) language preferences.

There are also GUI-only text editors, which also supports various languages and other features through plug-ins. Some of the most popular are

• Atom Links to an external site.,
• Sublime Text Links to an external site.,
• Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Links to an external site..

However, note that these editors don’t work with tmate, only the host will see the window.