emacs, pico, and nedit, Oh My

emacs, pico, and nedit, Oh My!

Many editors are available to the Linux user, either installed as part of the distribution or included on the distribution CD.

One of my old favorites is another nongraphical editor that makes a nice alternative for people who, having gotten up close and personal with vim, would prefer something else. It's called Pico (command name pico), which stands for "PIne COmposer." Pico is the full-screen editor distributed with PINE, a great text-based e-mail client distributed by the University of Washington.

Then we have the venerable Emacs. When talking about Emacs, it becomes somewhat difficult to classify it as strictly an editor. The brainchild of Richard M. Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation), GNU Emacs is more than just a nice, powerful, if somewhat complex, editor. It's a mail reader, newsreader, Web browser, program development environment, LISP interpreter, and more. To do Emacs justice, you would have to write an entire book. For some, this is too much editor. Yet many professional programmers tend to think differently and consider Emacs indispensable. Either way, you owe it to yourself to try this incredibly powerful and customizable tool.

Finally, I'd also like to mention NEdit (command name nedit), another editor I've taken quite a liking to. This is another multipurpose, graphical programmer's editor. I like the fact that NEdit manages to pack its many powerful features into a small, lightweight, and easy-to-use package.