Text editors with no mouse support, it is incredibly useful to know how to use at least one of these. The primary reason these editors have no mouse support is that they nearly predate the mouse. The arguments about the merits of Vi and Emacs pre-date the internet and have their own wikipedia page that may be considered suggested reading. In short emacs is considered more featured (having its own web browser, e-mail client and games and is often joked as being an operating system), while vim is more lightweight and is more ubiquitous. If learning vim, there is a dedicated vimtutor command that provides an in-vim, vim tutorial. An emacs tutorial can be accessed after opening emacs and then typing CTRL-h t.
The utility of learning an in-terminal text editor is that it makes editing code remotely much easier; simply ssh into the machine, crack open your text editor and get going! Both of these editors are fully scripted and are extendable with plugins in much the same way as anything else on this list. They also have three to four decades worth of support, documentation and guidance when compared to the other options.
To launch any of these from your terminal simply invoke
vim
emacsA quasi open source text editor written in the electron framework and developed by Microsoft. It's currently the most popular editor primarily to being pushed by Microsoft, integration with
Typescript and the ecosystem that's grown around it. Once installed, you can launch it from your terminal with the code command.
Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/download and download the appropriate installer for your operating system.
Download and execute the appropriate .exe file, and simply follow the installation instructions.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/mac
- Download Visual Studio Code for macOS.
- Double-click on the downloaded archive to expand the contents.
- Drag Visual Studio Code.app to the Applications folder, making it available in the Launchpad.
- Add VS Code to your Dock by right-clicking on the icon and choosing Options, Keep in Dock.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux
Download the appropriate installer. For debian based system, navigate to the Downloads directory and run:
$ sudo dpkg -i <vscode_installer>.debAnd replace the name in the angled brackets by the actual name of the installer.
VS Code should take care of this automatically. Let us know if you need a hand.
Install the Python extention for this. In the sidebar on the left, click on the Extensions symbol and install the ms-python.python extension. Note that in order for this to work you need to have a working Python environment set up with a linting module. We recomment pylint for that, which is shipped per default with the Anaconda distribution.
A non open source text editor. Unlike the other two it isn't written in the electron framework and is somewhat less resource intensive for it.
Once installed, you can launch it from your terminal with the subl command.
Install via chocolatey or use the regular installer from (here)[https://www.sublimetext.com/3]. For more details on chocolatey, see the primer on package managers.
If you are using chocolatey, the following should install sublime.
choco install sublimetext3
You have the choice of installing sublime either using brew, or downloading the .dmg file found (here)[https://www.sublimetext.com/3]. The instructions for the brew installation are given below, if you want to know more about brew, see the primer on package managers.
brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
brew tap caskroom/versions
brew cask install sublime-text
Installation instructions for a range of Linux distros can be found (here)[https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/linux_repositories.html]. A tarball installation can be found (here)[https://www.sublimetext.com/3].
The short version can be found below.
wget -qO - https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
echo "deb https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-text.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text
Sublime text has an optional package manager that can install plugins. We're going to want a few of these. The instructions to install the package manager can be found (here)[https://packagecontrol.io/installation].
You can access the command palette to use package control with control + shift + p or command + shift + p.
Open the command palette and go to Package Control: Install Package (typing will search and auto-complete). A second list will appear, this time displaying available packages. Find and select the Git package.
Open the command palette and go to Package Control: Install Package (typing will search and auto-complete). A second list will appear, this time displaying available packages. Find and select the Pylinter package.