Comments on: Battle of the Minimalist Text Editors

By: MyTextFile: Distraction Free Text Editor | MakeUseOf.com

MyTextFile: Distraction Free Text Editor | MakeUseOf.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:49:37 +0000

[...] check out other similar text editors in our “Battle of the minimalist text editors” [...]

By: Find Articles

Find Articles — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:34:37 +0000

I used to be a fan of Darkroom. However, my growing need for a number of text editing features led to learn to love Google Docs more.

By: marco

marco — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:00:33 +0000

Man, you missed the *** greatest *** text editor in the world:

PICO - The (Al)pine editor.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:31:55 +0000

How about because if you code in Word you’ll get those damned “smart quotes” which 1) aren’t even at the proper code point (Microsoft just made one up for them) and 2) make compilers freak out?

These are text editors, not word processors. There is a huge difference. Text editors are for plain text files which anyone can open. Word processors have formats which can’t be opened in everything under the sun. And if I wanted a word processor, I’d use OpenOffice.org. But I’m not stupid enough to code in a word processor.

I do most documents (as in, things which need formatting) using vim and LaTeX anyway though. I love LaTeX. It has wonderful typesetting algorithms, which makes sense since the God of Algorithms (aka Donald Knuth) made it. If it doesn’t need formatting, why use a word processor? That just adds overhead. Word processors use a lot more memory than any of these, and they create HUGE files. In a plain text file, only there are only as many bits encoded as you need for the characters in the file. A word processor includes unnecessary information such as what program generated the file, the name, address, etc. of the author, and a lot of formatting info that you just don’t need. In Microsoft Word’s case, your computer’s MAC address is even stored.

By: Alek Davis

Alek Davis — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:03:57 +0000

Thank you for mentioning Q10. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. It looks like a keeper.

By: Peter Donohoe

Peter Donohoe — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:18:28 +0000

I am a big fan of Text Pad, http://www.textpad.com give it a try.

By: curts

curts — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:02:57 +0000

This is a bit old-school, but throughout the ’90s I continued to use Wordstar 3.3 in a CP/M emulator for DOS for my serious writing. Same principle, just older tech. Interesting to see this idea making a comeback.

By: Visweshwar

Visweshwar — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:44:40 +0000

hmmm.. guys you’ve forgotten editplus a much better alternative to textpad

By: Aibek

Aibek — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:43:28 +0000

The idea behind these apps is to provide featureless and distraction free interface. When it comes to Word, some people tend to spend considerable amount of time playing around with the look of the page.

By: Alexander Rich-Shea

Alexander Rich-Shea — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:10:12 +0000

I don’t understand why you would use any of these options is you have Microsoft word. All of these features can be accessed using word, because you can change the font color and background color to you liking, and you can also use the fullscreen option to block out all other programs. This means that you get minimalist but can still use all the advance features you want when you’re done being zen.

By: John

John — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:27:53 +0000

thank you for the cool apps!

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:58:52 +0000

vim! It’s vi improved Nice commands like ci”, syntax highlighting, and the ability to backspace over stuff left of where you entered insert mode make it a big improvement.