Editors for Linux.

For a while, I've been upset at the sorry state of emacs. It is not HIG-compliant, and it doesn't use anti-aliased fonts. It is really a pain to remap all of the keybindings for emacs. And when you have three or more buffers open, it's a pain to switch between them.

So I've decided to abandon the one true editor.

First candidate for Hal's new editor: vim. I quickly dropped that when I realized that I didn't want to learn a whole new set of arcane keybindings.

Candidate 2: gedit. The default editor for my desktop of choice: Gnome. It has anti-aliased fonts and tabs, which I like, but lacks any other useful features.

Candidate 3: beaver. Beaver is a gtk+ editor that tries to be exactly what I want. It has tabs, syntax highlighting, gtk2 toolkit, and anti-aliased fonts. But it's still rough around the edges. I think it really wants to be adopted by the Gnome project.

Candidate 4: kate. Kate is the advanced editor for KDE. I don't really like KDE as much as Gnome, but ome of tha apps are okay. KDE has one great feature that is integreated into all of its apps: network transparency. At the command line, I can type

kate ftp://XXX@halcanary.org/public\_html/index.cgi

or

kate sftp://ups.physics.wisc.edu/home/hal/note-.txt

and it asks for a password and opens up the document in a local window. This is beautiful. It also has really good syntax highlighting. It does not have tabs, but it is easy to switch between buffers with alt-rightarrow and alt-leftarrow. It's also easy to edit the keybindings. I just made ctrl-w an alternate for close, and ctrl-[shift]-tab for forward[backward].

Also note that KDE is the desktop on Knoppix. Anywhere I can stick in a Knoppix CD, I can use kate to edit files locally.