brownbetty: Silouhette of figure, vines, planet in background (Explorer)
brownbetty ([personal profile] brownbetty) wrote in [community profile] command_liners2010-11-29 12:50 pm

Text editor recs?

I want a command line text editor that can do a soft-word wrap. By "soft," I mean that long lines won't scroll past the right edge of my screen, but when I save my file, I won't discover it's had a mess of line breaks inserted into my text every seventy-odd chars.

I'd be mostly writing in natural English, so emacs or vi are rather more complicated than I'm looking for, but if you tell me one of them is my only solution, I will cry and then suck it up and learn to use whichever.
karmag: Stylized face based on Dreamwidth logo (Default)

[personal profile] karmag 2010-12-01 12:04 pm (UTC)(link)
IIRC, there's a Google Tech Talk by the author of vim that is basically on the general theme of "use whatever text editor you're comfortable with, but learn to use it well". Seems like vim users are a pragmatic bunch.

the only difference between emacs and vim in the "comfort" level is whichever editor one was exposed to first is the one that one is going to be more comfortable with.


Still kind of sucks when your first exposure is "neither" though. I doubt the major Unix editors will ever feel right. :-/