[mdlug] Linux Text Editors -- Try Cooledit

[Steve Litt]

Jay said on Sat, 7 Jan 2023 05:42:26 -0500 (EST)

>Greetings,
>    And if you set up a .vimrc file you can customize vim to
> automatically 
>format various coding structures for you.  It will highlight portions
>of your code in select colors, format for C / Perl / HTML / XML / etc.

I know from experience that the preceding is true. I'm the originator
and first maintainer of the VimOutliner project, an outline processor
using Vim as its engine and user interface. I coded the body text and
executable-lines portion of VimOutliner myself.

This being said, customizing Vim in a major way is difficult. The Vim
customization language, VimL, is, well let's just say, weird and
difficult. Vim9 has a new and improved VimL, but let's just say it's
still not as easy as Python, Ruby, or Lua. Speaking of Lua, NeoVim uses
Lua instead of VimL, but it's still kind of difficult, from the
research I put in.

If you make a Vim plugin and use Vim's localleader facility, and if
Debian makes a package for it, they will change your localleader to an
inconvenient, hard to press and inconsistently positioned backslash.
With Vimoutliner this meant the Debian package changed the lightning
fast command prefix I specified, a double dot, to the awkward
double-backslash. Later VimOutliner's Debian maintainer became the
VimOutliner project's maintainer and set the main code to
double-backslash, so I'm thinking of forking the project. :-)

For coding HTML, I found VScode much faster/better than Vim for
authoring HTML, considering what I'd need to do to modify any existing
Vim HTML plugin. I used to use Bluefish for HTML, but their project
dropped Zen-code because they couldn't make the transition from Python
2.7 to Python 3.x.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm