Someone was still asking about text editors.
There have been numerous suggestions in this topic. Is there any any alternative we’ve missed?
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I want to write some more about code editors. I mentioned Emacs, and later Doom Emacs. The other day I listened to a DT video; Derek is a guy who used to be a Vim fan, but he moved about 3 years ago to Doom Emacs because it has vi, emacs, and space key bindings. It also has an astounding array of tools, which is why it’s been jokingly called an operating system.
Anyway, the big takeaway from his video was to consider starting an Emacs server daemon, then when you invoke Emacs, instead call emacsclient, so I set up an Emacs server to start with my system, and then I changed my quickie alias to start up the emacsclient instead of a standard invocation, and on top of that, I kept it “Doom Emacs”.
VERY impressive! Now Emacs starts as fast as any other editor you can cite, it has vi, Emacs, and space key bindings, it starts up very fast and it can handle any editing needs, from simple stuff to major project work. I used it daily in my last professional job, but I’ve added this “Doom Emacs” and emacsclient setup to my stuff these days and I agree with DT; it’s THE way to go! Check out some Distro Tube videos on Doom Emacs and see what I mean!
I’ve tried vs code, atom, sublime etc, but I always end up using vim. I did use emacs/gcc/gdb for coding back in the day, but these days I’m mostly writing shell and perl, and occasional c, and vim does what I need.
I mentioned “DT” the other day, so to J_J_Sloan and to others who may be vim users, (and assuming I can share the link), DT has a video especially useful to those who have never tried or used Doom Emacs.
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Just edited the post; the link to the RAW HTML link of the video it was broken so I just pasted what was visible into the url. Good ole’ DT!!! He sold or at the very least seasoned me into fast workspace switching.
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Yeah, Derek, a.k.a. Distro Tube is a very good instructor. He learns about stuff very well himself, then he does a fantastic job of explaining what he learns to his audience; that’s why he has a very good connection to Linux users. He’s very biased toward Doom Emacs, especially as a former Neovim/Vim user; since Doom Emacs has both vi, Emacs, and space key bindings, but Emacs is so much more than just an editor, it’s a complete development environment and it even has Lisp-based games (ask the Doctor is one I remember). Maybe That is a reason for trying out Doom Emacs! 
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yeah i like DT. Hey DT 
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I like Geany. It sits between simple text editors and monster IDEs.
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I use pluma (fork of gedit) with Cobalt theme almost exclusively.
( often for bash and C )
geany is definitely my choice if pluma is not around.
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All of the ones mentioned are good; people who get into silly wars are indeed silly - for instance the Emacs versus Vi wars! Doom Emacs is the great equalizer - it’s the best merger of vi and emacs that I have ever experienced; if you’re used to vi you can use vi key bindings; emacs key bindings are still available and there are some easy key bindings with the space key as the “leader key”; Emacs, and Doom Emacs, are more than just editors, they offer a great number of development utilities too; with all of that functionality you’d think it was a huge pig - it’s actually much more nimble than the Web interface to this site, so size is not a factor, but if you start an Emacs server and run it as a “daemon process”, Emacs is as fast as any editor you’ve used, at the expense of a server image.
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I like and use geany too; it’s smaller and it’s convenient and fast. Pluma - I’ve tried it but since I have so many others that I use it didn’t get a lot of my attention; that doesn’t negate it a bit; each tool has particular advantages that are especially valuable for their designed purposes; if for example Pluma is intended specifically for C and Bash coding it undoubtedly has some conveniences that are appealing to C programming and Bash shell scripting. That’s probably the attraction I had to it; the only reason I didn’t do more is that my familiarity with other tools with similar capabilities interfered with gaining more expertise with this one.
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So many tools and so little time
It’s true. There are so many to choose from that it’s impossible to know them all within one lifetime 
b.t.w. ‘pluma’ is just a simple editor. Nothing fancy. Just an editor.
But I love its code-colored text-marking and it recognizes a phletora of languages
On the picture below you see a subset of what it recognizes.
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I like editors that can handle code-colored text-marking; the ones I talk about the most often - Doom Emacs and Neovim (console or GUI variations) have similar capabilities. Doom Emacs is way more than an editor. Neovim is a refactoring of Vim.
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So, I downloaded and began playing with Zed. (I’d been intrigued with it early on but waited until it was more “real”.)
Wow, it is wicked fast! I also like where they’ve taken the layout. So far, so good.
I’ve been using Claude for several projects lately so I decided to add it to the mix and – wow – even Claude is faster. Certainly faster than the web but even subjectively faster than using it in VSCode.
Maybe I’d just become used to a laggard relying on VSCode for most things. But at this point, I’m thinking Zed might become my new editor during jour. 
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Thank you, Halano, for that snapshot about usage.
Is the nvim all strictly neovim, or does that have GVim usage subsumed in those totals?
My first editor was the IBM ISPF Editor, on their System 360 VM/CMS (5 years at Pratt & Whitney Canada) for programming NC Machine Tools:
- APT
- Sundtrand SPLIT
- UNIAPT
- COMPACT II
I then “leap-frogged” into the future when I was introduced to the venerable vi in late 1984 on HP-UX 5.0 on HP9000 Model 550 mini-computer that I administered with 12 CAD/CAM terminals attached via 4 multiplexers (3 on each) to maximize bus thruput for User responsiveness doing mechanical design of plastic injection moulds for Nortel telephone sets (residential and business).
I have been using vi, and its latest reincarnation as GVim, as my primary editor ever since!
I reviewed the book
- Modern Vim - Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim
but neovim’s adoption of Lua, while commendable and a logical next step, was “a bridge too far” for me! So I only use GVim as a basic editor which more than satisfies all my needs.
Within the MATE environment, the natural choice should have been Pluma, but that was too “simplistic” and too much akin to working with LibreOffice Writer for my taste.
Lastly, I have, and still do, use Geany for some limited programming involving C language, which was also my first introduction to an actual IDE, back in 2022. I try to limit my work in Geany to tweaking code that has been worked and re-worked using GVim.
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I don’t really edit code but when I need a text editor i also prefer Pluma with the cobalt theme. I prefer to stick to the default text editor.
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@ericmarceau I have to believe that the nvim stats include all forms of vim, gvim and nvim/Neovim variations. Vim has been one of the dominant text editors over a very long time and it builds on several platforms, which, like Emacs, makes it very extensible.
The other thing about nvim is that the latest version is 0.12, and on most distributions you don’t see it in their repository, which makes me think that well over 95% of that number is vim, not nvim. That said, the core of the editor is basically vim; it’s the extensions and plugin capabilities that are being completely rewritten in Neovim. Also, you can see that I’m using nvim and Neovim interchangeably; the product name is Neovim, the image name is nvim.
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