I’m a linux newbie coming from a Windows background and I am trying to find a simple full-screen console-based plain-text editor. Something that emulates the look and feel of the Windows edit.com would be perfect.
Specifically, I’m looking for;
- A plain text editor.
- Console-based not GUI-based.
- Full-screen not command line.
- Menus to tell me what my options are. I don’t want to have to find out and remember a complex set of keystrokes specific to that one application.
- An application that is in the default apt-get / yum repositories, or failing that is easy for a newbie to install.
I’m using small-footprint versions of Ubuntu 904 and Centos 5.5.
edit:
I suppose what I’m looking for is a console editor that conforms to the normal keystrokes used by GUI editors, ie. cursor keys to move up/down/left/right, pg-up / pg-down keys to move up and down a page, home / end keys to move to the start or end of a line etc etc. In other words, the keys we all use without thinking, in any GUI environment, be it Windows or Linux.
For the “GUI-shortcuts”, try Diakonos editor (it is in the repositories). One of the author’s goals is actually to provide similar keyboard-shortcuts interface, so that ^O, ^S, ^W, F1 etc do exactly what you would expect from a GUI editor.
Another good choice is jed (also in the repositories). It has emacs-like shortcuts, but it also has a menu row, allowing to visually navigate through commands (and the menu also does show the shortcuts). Jed also has some nice features for programmers. Overall, I like jed more than diakonos – give it a try.
It is also worth mentioning that almost always keyboard shortcuts are configurable. That is still an inconvenience (esp. when working with multiple PCs), but an option.