May I introduce you to the simple life of just using whatever text editor and terminal that comes presintalled on your favoraite distro? It's ridiculous how far this can get you, I've been enjoying gnome text ediotor with gnome terminal.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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ed is a truly wonderful editor indeed!
The greatest WYGIWYG editor, with an extremely consistent error interface.
Works great on 300 baud; not many editors can boast that. Also, if your programs are all under 2000 lines long.
some distros ship kate, and that's a super good pick for code editing
Yeah no thanks. Linting, formatting, LSP integration, Treesitter,... are just kind of essential for programming work. And the advantage of nvim/emacs/... is that you can bend them to your will and preferences.
If you just want to edit some config files, sure, use literally anything. But I need something proper for work, and if I already set all of that up, might as well use it for the config files, too.
Fake news. Emacs is the only text editor non-heathens and heathens should be using.
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You really should use vim though.
No (I already somewhat learned Emacs, I ain't gonna learn something new)
That's how the meme goes though. Anytime someone suggests, says something positive about one of vim or emacs, the response should be that they should use the other. π
It's an almost 40-year-old flame war.
Me:
Go, nano!
I even tried micro.
me want nano. nano edit important file pulsar can't. dolphin angry if me use like administrator.
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nvim
ftfy
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Iβve been using emacs for work for years because the proprietary language I have to work in was set up with emacs as the default editor. I bitched and moaned when I first started because I was used to more modern solutions.
When they finally got VS Code support workingβ¦I stayed with emacs. Stockholm Syndrome, I suspect. But I know what Iβm doing in emacs. Iβm comfortable.
A wild guess.. Magik/Smallworld? That was it for me.
Nah, itβs called CM which I believe stands for Configura Magic. Itβs a C-based language sort of similar to C#, but specifically made for use with Configuraβs space-planning software.
I actually like the language, I just hate that itβs extremely niche.
Edit: the similarity between the names Magik and Configura Magic is not lost on me, but I donβt think theyβre related.
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Neovim with Nvchad is what finally made me ditch pretty much all other IDEs. As much as I used to like Jetbrains, they've pivoted to vibe coding so hard that I can't justify using their IDEs.
I like neovim for personal projects in Rust, Lua and JS but for collaborative work in Java it's not really usable for me. Database access, merging big PRs, unit testing tools, debugging, integrations with Spring... I always saw too many feature gaps to even try.
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I use helix btw
There are dozens of us!
I decided to give it an honest try after somebody mentioned it on lemmy a few weeks ago.
... I really like it.
I still pop open Theia if I'm just doing some research that has me hopping all around, or sometimes on a separate monitor for a referenced project/library associated with my work, but I do the actual work in Helix.
I guess we are more on the vim side in the editor wars, but only against our shared foes
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Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast
All time classic.
Im not going crazy just playing around a bit, remapping some keybindings and so on. It is in fact kind of fun.
(I actually just tried jumping to the first line of my comment while writing it using C-a, which is the default keybind for this in emacs. I think its getting worse. Aaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhh)
Im a neovim user myself, and i swapped my caps and escape keys at the os level. I touch another computer and am WONDERING WHY IM WRITING LIKE THIS xD
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Save yourself the trouble and just skip ahead: real programmers use butterflies
Good olβ C-x M-c M-butterfly
I may be crazy, but for regular text file, VIM is usually my go to. But, because of tag auto completion Bluefish has been my HMTL/CSS editor for a while. Most other things are in VIM. Bash? VIM. Python? VIM. C? Trash bin! Did not like the C class I took last quarter!
Exception being things like .docx or .odt files that have no business being opened in VIM.
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emacs kicks ass
It becomes a tool for doing whatever you are doing at the moment.
I think the beauty of Emacs is not that it gives you a text editor, but that it gives you a lisp environment.
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The problem with Emacs is that it sucks but there is nothing better, and you are getting stuck with it forever. Welcome!
I used to use Neovim until I got tired of it and switched to Helix. I tried Emacs for a bit but turns out that Helix does everything I need it to do without any extra configuration.
And of course I use caps:swapescape because I am not reaching all the way to the Escape key all the time.
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Emacs and (Neo)Vim are a bit too overwhelming for me. I've tried Neovim for a relatively long time, but I felt kind of overloaded with the vast amount of features and plugins it has. I've tried Emacs a bit, but its complexity always scared me (not to mention it uses its own version of Lisp, a language that is notorious for its ability of creating new language features on the fly, hence even more complexity). I've been using Helix, and I couldn't be happier. I've realized that I don't really care much about editor customization, and that what I was looking for was just a cool modal editor with some useful features (such as file picker, LSP, tree-sitter, multiple cursors, ...). The keybinds are also easier to grasp, as fewer of them feel arbitrary compared to Vim. In Vim and Emacs, it feels like you can do everything, while in Helix, it feels more like you can do everything the developers think that might be useful for you. Who knows, maybe I'll try again Emacs and (Neo)Vim again in the far future, but I don't feel like it for now.
May I recommend Helix? Itβs a modal editor like vim, but has a better out of the box experience, better discoverability for commands, and uses an easier to understand select->command syntax.
Just started using helix a few months ago and I'm in love. The movement took a second to get used to but its super efficient once you get the hang of it. I highly recommend it, especially if you're doing any kind of programming or sysadmin work and you hate gui ides.
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:q no w just q
WARNING: buffer has changed, add ! To quit without saving!
One of my year goals is to change from vsc to vim hehe
This is also my goal! ...since 2020.
I love vim/nvim but I've gotten used to using VIM more as a text editor then an IDE. Writing a script? Taking notes? Maybe even a small program? VIM all the way. Working on a big project that needs an LSP? Either spend the next 20 hours fucking with your VIM config and 20 plugins to get basic functionality... Or just open VSCode and install one plugin
Heres to hoping since NVIM 0.11 with their LSP overhaul I can finnally make the full switch
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Emacs is love, emacs is life
Good, good! You're on the right way! But remember, there is a world outside your Emacs, don't forget about it.
I keep thinking that as I use vim, I'll feel the need to learn more commands, but I hardly do anything except:
- q, wq, or q!, quit with or without saving
- i, insert
- set:paste, preserves spacing
- Shift-insert, pastes if shift-ctrl-v doesn't work
- / , search for a string (iirc, don't really need it much).
What are your vim GOTOs?
My most used commands are also just the classics
cw - delete the next word amd enter insert mode
dd - delete line
gg - go to first line
G - go to last line
:s/searchphrase/replacephrase - search and replace
And a couple of visual mode commands do cut and paste blocks or comment out blocks of code
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:q!
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