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21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks)

Posted Aug 26, 2008 22:32 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: 21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) by dmaxwell
Parent article: 21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks)

*Seven* megabytes is large? I thought Emacs and XEmacs had suboptimal
handling of large files because of their hundreds-megabyte-range buffer
size limits and slow end-of-line detection in such buffers... but any
editor which eats gigabytes of memory loading in 7Mb deserves throwing
out. More, it deserves ritual burning, in front of the editor's
developers, following which those developers should be restricted to a
ZX81 for the next year or so (until they learn better).

Anything else would just be extremism.

(Log in to post comments)

Bloat I say, bloat!!

Posted Aug 27, 2008 1:51 UTC (Wed) by zenaan (subscriber, #3778) [Link]

sed is your friend:

From:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-10/...
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-10/...
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-11/...

>> I would hope so, tomorrow will be 21.1's 3rd birthday! (I wasn't able
>> to find 21.1's release date in 15 seconds of googling so I don't know
>> how much older it is.)
>
> But three years old... made me do a double take.

The most recent release of Emacs was 21.3, which was released about a
year and a half ago. There will be a new release sometime in the murky
near future (as in, probably before June).

My impression is that Tom was previously using something like Emacs
18.50, so I expect anything without a crank would look pretty
impressive... :-)

---
That's about right. What with fonts and images, 21 is looking to me
like what a web browser isf _supposed_ to be. A really, really, good
web browser. (needs "frames" (in the browser sense), tables,
arbitrary embedded X windows (in "frames" at least) ... hmm. that's
about it.)

---
Well that explains everything! I was trying to use it as an editor.

---
> Fool! If you want an editor, there's `ed'.

ed?! What luxury! In the days ... it was echo and cat for us...

---
Why echo? cat is more than enough to write into files :)

% cat << FOO >> file.c
int main(){
...
}
FOO

Oh, maybe you have a luxury shell with echo built in :)

---
You are of course assuming the luxury of a shell

Bloat I say, bloat!!

Posted Aug 27, 2008 2:20 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]

I loved that episode of Monty Python! :-)

Smooth I say, Emacs is smooth!!

Posted Aug 27, 2008 10:03 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Emacs 22 came out march this year. Its got masses of features, all of which stay out of your way but are easy to discover, get documentation for, and see the source code of.

Its core design goal is for users to be able to modify its behaviour, and after 32 years of use and developement, its very rich, and very smoothest.

It opens 256Mb files no problem.

21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks)

Posted Aug 27, 2008 9:13 UTC (Wed) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

to be fair, when you start kedit and attempt to open a large file (I tried the aforementioned 7 MB), it popped up a dialog box that said:

The file you have requested is larger than KEdit is designed for. Please ensure you have enough system resources available to safely load this file, or consider using a program that is designed to handle large files such as KWrite.

This seems to imply that it was deliberate in some way...

[and although I normally avoid cliches like the plague, you can take my Vim away from my cold, dead fingers!]

Like the Plague

Posted Aug 27, 2008 19:18 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

You say you avoid clichés "like the plague"? I don't believe you. ;-)