What less popular text editors do you like or should have a shout out more often? What stuff do you do with it?

Micro - not quite as fancy as Helix but it’s a static binary, bells and whistles included, and ready to go without config. If you’re still using nano/pico, micro is a nice step up in functionality without the complexity of vim et al.

Multiple cursors, splits and tabs, mouse support, syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts that are more noob-friendly / familiar, it’s great.

Helix. A perfect programmer's editor you can use with almost no config.

Helix

I'd describe it as "NeoVim for people who don't want to spend time configuring it". It has syntax highlighting (for pretty much any language you can think of) and LSP support out of the box. And the config file is just a TOML file. Here's my current config for example:

theme = "monokai_pro_spectrum"

[editor]
line-number = "relative"
middle-click-paste = false

[editor.statusline]
mode.normal = "NORMAL"
mode.insert = "INSERT"
mode.select = "SELECT"

That's it. No need to deal with Lua or VimScript

Also using commands after typing the : is easier than in NeoVim since Helix will show you a list of available commands and a description of the closest match (or the one you choose from the list with the tab key). It looks like this:

I use Helix for quickly editing files and coding

Kate. Its such a brilliant foundation.

I currently have no idea of how to do it but in theory you can add any languages autocomplete, as well as huge libraries of auto-text (like in VSCode, templates for code stuff).

And its fast, unlike stupid electron VSCodium

Kate is my togo. With a terminal panel and latex->Unicode plugin is perfect for julia. I don't need it, but you can also set up its LSP client.

I've been using Lapce for a bit and it's pretty cool, like VSCode but written in Rust. It's actually so much faster, like you press a key and there's instantly autocomplete suggestions and error warnings, so it feels a lot more responsive than VSCode. It also opens faster. There's still a couple weird things and missing functionality though because it's early in development so I'll probably go back to VSCode for now.

I use Pulsar for working on my many JavaScript projects. It's a FOSS, community-maintained replacement for the canceled Atom text editor.

https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar

Idk if it counts as less popular, but I always thought Sublime got too much flak. The popups are annoying, but other than that it's a great editor imo. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of something like VSCode or a full IDE, but that's also why I like it, it's much more snappy and lightweight. And you can still get things like LSP working so for me at least it gives me everything I look for in an editor. I even decided to pay for a license a few years back, considering I make my salary with this thing the cost is negligible.

The original "ed" text editor, from 1969 Unix. Everyone should spend a few days trying to get some work done with it, if only to appreciate how we have nicer things now.

It's not exactly lesser known, but I only use Kate on both Linux and Windows

Geany. A real sleak, flexible and powerful editor.

You can use it to edit multiple lines simultaneously, perform extensive search/replace operations, etc.

It has plugins that can transform it from a humble notepad to a full IDE with code versioning support.

It often saves me from having to muck about with sed or awk in some tasks.

Before I got around to learning vi, I spent a few years using joe, which seems to have fallen out of active development (the last release was in 2018). It's a terminal-based editor that bears some resemblance to old DOS editors.

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

I'll give you six that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

• sim and vis, both of which focus on combining vim motions with structural regular expressions as used in...

• sam and acme from Plan 9, both of which are included in Plan 9 from User Space (aka plan9port). sam also has a modified/expanded version in the form of deadpixi/sam, while acme has spin-offs like a port to Go and a standalone version.

• mg, one of the three default text editors included with OpenBSD (the others being vi and ed).

• sandy, the abandoned suckless text editor. It uses dmenu and is fun to mess with for shits and giggles.

Ed Is The Standard Text Editor

I'm not saying it doesn't get a lot of shout outs, but it could always do with one more. I think the last time I used it was to automate the editing of config files on some antiquated telephony system by piping ed commands through netcat. There remains a chance that I might live long enough to find some excuse to use it again.

@InternetCitizen2

Currently, I prefer using Helix.

Emacs. Everything.

I like xed for coding. Simple, costumisable enough, great experience.

Kwrite. I write a lot of text at work and I hate using word processors. I use this app for its excellent autocomplete feature. You type a word once and for next instances you can use tab to auto-complete. Very convenient.

I am a huge Vim nerd, but I do a lot of copy-paste with one-off minor formatting in between. Sometimes Vim is more efficient at this, but often it really isn't and I'm quicker to use a dumb Notepad-like.

I've previously used Gedit in Gnome 2, Pluma which is MATE's equivalent, Xed which is Linux Mint's equivalent, and currently on Mousepad which is XFCE's equivalent. That's also mostly the history of my desktop environments over the last two decades.

I've been looking for a long time for a good alternative to sublime text.

however it's not really a text editor, it's more like a full IDE at this point, I really like lapce, it does have some bugs, but it's really lightweight and fast, and I like the UI a lot

I frequently use Howl

Distraction free, command autocompletion, Vim-like control is optional. I learned most of the commands by just opening the mini buffer (alt-x) then tab to watch the autocompletion list.

A terminal editor named Nice Editor (ne). It just makes sense. Ctrl+s saves, Ctrl+q quits. It's a suped up nano with sensible keyboard shortcuts.

• Helix for terminal editing because I never got on well with the order you had to do things in Vim, Helix (and Kakoune) make more sense to me.
• Lite-XL for a lightweight GUI editor. I just think its neat.
• Pulsar for everything else (mainly because I'm involved with it, come visit us on Lemmy at !pulsaredit@lemmy.ml /shill). Literally over 10k packages for install and an awful lot of active development.

Edit: Using this to give a shout out to other projects I've come across on my travels:

• Brackets/Phoenix - A community effort to keep the abandoned Adobe Brackets editor going, has a web version now, linux version still in the works after Adobe removed support for it.
• CudaText - Pretty fast and supports a huge number of languages
• eCode - Not used it in a while but is part of the eeep GUI project, lightweight and pretty interesting with lots of active development on both eCode and eeep.
• Bitters - Very much an oddball here, inspired by the Canon CAT word processor/computer from the 80s with a really interesting "leaping" way of navigating text.
• Aura Text - Interesting little editor written in Python

And some terminal ones:

• Zee - an emacs-like editor written in Rust. Main repo seems to be dead but one of the Lapce devs is working on a fork of it - https://git.panekj.dev/pj/zee
• Amp - another Rust based editor with some interesting ways to navigate text
• dte - Just a nice terminal editor
• moe - Vim-like editor written in Nim (not to be confused with GNU Moe)
• Feather - Specifically for opening huge files
• Tilde - Curses type interface, can be used with a mouse in some terminals

Gedit. It just works.

I like gedit. I like one or two of the built in themes. You can select a format on the bottom right (json, for example) and it'll highlight and change the color if certain things.

Linux people seem to be obsessed with text editors. If I'm on windows I use notepad and on linux I use Kate or whatever the default is. What am I missing out on by not trying out different editors?

Edwin

Edwin an Emacs-like editor programmed by some of the guys who maintain the MIT-Scheme programming language, which is (I think) the original implementation of the Scheme programming language developed by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy Steele (or a predecessor of it). To this day, MIT-Scheme continues to be one of the fastest Scheme implementations, producing extremely efficient binaries for a high-level language.

It is Emacs-like in nature, except instead of scripting it in Emacs Lisp, you use Scheme. Unlike Emacs, there are very few extensions available for it, so no Org-Mode, no Magit, no nice themes. The GUI version of it is so antiquated, it uses its own widget toolkit that is similar to the Athena Widget Toolkit.

Although I use Emacs for everything, I still love Edwin just because I like Scheme as a language better than Emacs Lisp. I wish I had more free time, I would like to help modernize Edwin. Although at this point it would probably easier to write a whole new Emacs-like editor using Guile Scheme instead, since there is a very active user community around Guile Scheme, especially among the Guix OS clique.

Mousepad is my daily driver for all my quick notes

• vis
  vim/nvim was bloated 4 my use case, but ví wasn't enough. I like minimal and suck less.

I wish gnome-builder had a better vim-mode, I would use it more often over VSCode.

Jed when you want a simple, Emacs-like editor.

Haven't seen anyone mention the Zed Text Editor yet. It's only available on MacOS as of now, but I've tried it out a bit and once it's more mature (and available on other OSes), I might switch over from Sublime Text. It's got a similar speed as Sublime, but with LSP, vim emulation and collaboration features built in, whereas in Sublime I need to install packages to achieve the same. Also made by the same people who originally made Atom and Treesitter.

I also want to mention Onivim. Unfortunately, development has stopped, so it's not really a viable option anymore, but I loved the idea. The idea was to make a vscode/vim hybrid. To that extend, it's written in Reason which allowed them to support vscode extensions, thus they didn't have to create their own extension ecosystem, while still being faster than electron. As for the vim part, the entire editor could be controlled with a keyboard. They had a global shortcut to go into a "UI move mode" so to say, which allowed you to go to every single piece of UI you had on screen. Thus they were able to copy the vscode UI, but still be keyboard-only. It was a surprisingly effective idea, so I hope some people can revive it someday.

Linux:

• Kate
• Xed

Windows:

• Kate
• Notepad
• Notepad++

For terminal; micro is nano but sane and easier to use.

For GUI; Kate is so incredible at any task I need. Note taking, to scripting, to planning out a small post online, it does the work easily.

Joe - just for quick edits on a text file

I'm using ed for small edits when I know exactly that only a certain line needs to be deleted, or a word changed.

notepad.exe

Kate/KWrite on KDE, Xed on any GTK DE, and micro for the terminal.

neovim

Geany is the one I recommend, but I have naturally used Notepad++/Notepadqq on Windows/Linux too much at this point. So... no idea.