New Linux User

Linux Text Editors: Geany and Emacs

by Clair on August 21st, 2007

I recall when I was fiddling around with Mandrake 10 (now Mandriva)’s package manager, I installed several text editors and IDEs. I installed Quanta, Screem, GNU Emacs 19 and Vim. At the time I liked Quanta a lot because it was something like Dreamweaver, as far as I was concerned at the time. I was experimenting with my blog so I really enjoyed using Quanta because of how it helped me view my work as I was making it. But even then Emacs fascinated me so much. It is, after all, an all-in-one text editor.

Aiya~ I’ve been reminiscing because of Rom’s blog entry about the Linux text editor shoot-out on Computerworld. Of course, Emacs is in that shoot-out, hehe. Not everyone likes Emacs but there are several things I simply love about it:
Write your code and commit it via an integrated version control client.
You could do almost everything in Emacs (listen to music, chat, view pictures, surf the intarwebs, and work — yeah, that one too).
Planner-el! (Of course, this is what got me hooked on to Emacs in the first place.)

Aside from Emacs, I also like Geany. It’s probably something that Notepad++ - tabbed files, syntax highlighting, code folding (and without the weird tab indicator like that of Kate) and auto-completion of code. The interns at the office got comfortable using it when they switched from Windows to Linux so suddenly (they’ve had Windows-related problems on their laptops and then they decided to be influenced and so they installed Ubuntu!) and we even completed a project with practically half the team on Linux using this editor.

I guess it depends on what you really want done and what you need. After all, you can simply install a separate client for version control then a text editor so that would make Emacs out of the question. But Geany is something new Linux users could probably easily adapt.

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