Open Source

Man that's obscure, not even gentoo has it. What is it?

this stands for "advanced easy editor" but mostly referenced only as "easy editor" you may find it http://www.users.qwest.net/~hmahon/s...-1.4.2.src.tgz
it's very intuitional, similar to nano /pico

ALL HAIL vi

It takes some getting use to, though.

plain good old - vi - ;-)

I used to use joe ...

i voted for vi, because i use it by default. it is always there, and works the same (well, you know what i mean) on different systems. My first laptop had a nonfunctional escape key though, so somebody advised me to use emacs instead of vi (as, at that time i was a 100% newbie). I did like emacs, however having heard a lot of comments from people about bloat and unneccessary features, i tend to agree. also, emacs is not default on many systems, it is a third party application, as it were.

For GUI text editors though, i would choose gedit. It's not in the list i noticed, i was about to choose nedit in its absence, but had to go for vi, since i do actually use it more. When writing html i use bluefish, it has nice colour highlighting, but you'll need to rattle through the preferences on first run to set it up.

Other text based editors i liked were joe, nano, pico and jed. joe has a nice thing where it can sort of emulate emacs and pico (called by typing jmacs or jpico instead of joe) which i liked a lot. on smaller systems for older PCs, it can be a better idea to have joe instead of emacs for this reason.

GUI editor=krwite
console editor=vi
alias vi='vim'