Text editor recs?

[brownbetty]

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.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Agreed with all of the above. Mind you, the "knowing vi because it's a lowest common denominator on unix" is probably only important if you're a system administrator, surely? For one's own systems "knowing a command-line editor" is probably enough. I've noticed that with some Linuxes, for example, the install-disc doesn't include vim or emacs, but has something like nano or pico instead.

I'm a vim power user, and while I like to tease emacs power users, it's stupid to get into a flamewar about it. It's best that people use the editor they're comfortable with using, and I reckon that 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.

[pne]

It's best that people use the editor they're comfortable with using, and I reckon that 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.

That's pretty much my opinion, too - I'm also a vim user, but I attribute this not to any advantage of vim's but merely to the fact that I was exposed to vi fairly early on in my use of computers. Had I been taught emacs instead, I'm sure I would be an avid emacs user these days.

[karmag]

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. :-/