My early birthday/start of NaNo present this year was an Acer Aspire One who I have named Robert. Robert came with Windows XP and retained it for nearly ten whole minutes between opening the box and installing Ubuntu from a flash drive. Right now I'm doing most things in gedit, which in general I like, but I thought I'd check to see what else is out there. Something that did a better job of remembering what I was working on last time it was opened (I know there's a session restore plugin, but you have to manually save and restore sessions, I'd rather have it happen automatically) would be nice, as would something with an automatically-updated word count. But my only "must"s are full screen mode and that it be fast.
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General Writing: http://therantinggeek.com
Economics Writing: http://technosocialism.com
Handmade goods for sale: http://antieuclid.1000markets.com
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Okt 28, 2009 - 21 58
Personally I messed with several and ended up just going back to gedit. But the three you're most likely to see recommended are:
emacs
vi
nano
The first two tend to ignite nerd wars over which is superior, while the latter tends to have relatively few recommendations by comparison. All three are terminal text editors, I know that emacs has a GUI version, unsure about the other two. They all use an advanced system of hotkeys and commands to quickly move about and edit documents, and generally take a long time to learn because of it. (It's entirely possible to open something in front of what you were doing, and then be totally unable to find your original work when you're new at it.)
I won't argue that they can, in the long run, be faster, but as text editors go I prefer to work with simpler ones in a GUI that don't require a cheat-sheet to navigate, so I'll recommend sticking with gedit, unless and until you've had the time to learn one of the above.
----------2008: Painted Souls
2009: The Black War
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Okt 28, 2009 - 22 42
Personally, I like joe. It has onscreen help, and it can run in a compatibility mode so it functions like vi or emacs, if you really prefer.
----------http://zvi.dreamwidth.org/ blog
http://zvilikestv.net/ website
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Okt 29, 2009 - 04 03
After I installed Linux on an aging powerbook g4, I went on a long a hearty search for a decent text editor. Don't like emacs or vi (I guess I'm just not hardcore enough...).
The one I fell for is Kate. Granted, I use it more for scripting and coding than straight up writing, but I just like the interface and layout the most of everything I tried (and I must have tried well over 30 different editors).
----------frakart.com
Typewriter Brigade - Olympia SM4
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Okt 31, 2009 - 07 33
Seconded! joe is awesome!
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'9: Ytin'he'ny - those who are changed
Bottles of Coke: 18 (29.5 liters)
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Back up your novel, now!
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Okt 31, 2009 - 08 44
Another Kate user here (since I use KDE as my desktop, and because I Kate for coding). I leave all the formatting to LaTeX, and Kate supports highlighting/colors for LaTeX markup (which may be true for any advanced text editor). Lets me focus my writing time on writing.
(I do wish there was an open source offering for a full fiction writing environment allowing management of information, while storing all content in easily-accessible text files. Haven't had any success programming one of my own, neither.)
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Okt 31, 2009 - 08 53
I use emacs for plain text files. It takes about a day to learn enough commands to get started. If you can do CRTL-X/S to save, CRTL-X/CTRL-C to get out and CTRL-S to search you can get going and pick the rest up as you go.
For writing I always use OpenOffice. There are alternatives. AbiWord is simpler and Applix has some tools that are very useful for writing.
Incidentally I'm also called Robert, and wrote "Teach Yourself Linux" published by Hodder in the UK and McGraw-Hill in the US.
44,049 / 50,000
Okt 31, 2009 - 10 13
Depending on what I'm doing, I alternate between gedit and emacs.
But for novel writing, I've gone with PyRoom
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Okt 31, 2009 - 12 36
I'd recommend Kate -- it sounds like it would work for pretty much everything you're asking for.
I myself will probably be writing in OpenOffice and maybe in Kate or JDarkRoom if I can get it working, depending on how meta whatever I end up writing is (whether I need formatting to tell what world's which, basically).
UPDATE: I just discovered and installed PyRoom. It's a pretty good exclude-everything text editor! With really pretty themes and an autosave function. I am currently informing the internet at large that I think I'm in love.
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Nov 1, 2009 - 14 52
PyRoom is OK. I like TextRoom a lot better. I go back and forth between TextRoom and gEdit.
http://textroom.sourceforge.net/
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Nov 3, 2009 - 09 37
I use gVim for everything related to text editing, except for writing my novel. I use PyRoom for that. I would probably use TextRoom but that is Qt-based and I'm running a very, very lightweight Gtk-based (non-GNOME) system on my Aspire One 110L. This thing boots to a fully functional desktop in less than ten seconds, so I can't be clogging it up with the whole Qt library just for one application. PyRoom is Gtk, so it wins. TextRoom does look prettier though. It actually has GUI-based bar on the bottom, whereas PyRoom looks more like a thin veneer on top of a command line text editor. Suits me just fine though, and I haven't had a problem with the program speed at all. Progress speed, well, that's another story (har har!).
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Nov 4, 2009 - 10 30
Geany. It's all I use now for writing after trying all the others.
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Nov 4, 2009 - 16 02
I've used OpenOffice, obviously which isn't necessarily fast.. but AbiWord seems to work well, as does LeafPad. I don't use either one for coding anything, but for writing a novel I think they would work better.
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Nov 5, 2009 - 09 41
I've been playing around with TextRoom and it's fantastic! I love the live word count. Thanks for the suggestion.
----------General Writing: http://therantinggeek.com
Economics Writing: http://technosocialism.com
Handmade goods for sale: http://antieuclid.1000markets.com
35,814 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 11 04
I tend to use gedit when I have access to a GUI and nano when I don't.
I really like the sound of pyRoom and the other full-screen editors. Lack of clutter is essential for writing novels in a time crunch, and while gedit does that job nicely, I suppose you *could* make it even more minimal :D
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Nov 6, 2009 - 10 39
I've been using only OpenOffice for all of my writing on any computer that I totally forgot it's a linux program too. I know it's not the greatest, but I gives me the layout I want and its as intuitive as MSOffice without costing $200.
That said, I also used Kate on my linux machine, never found a reason to look for anything else.
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08: A Sky Without Stars - 11k (Pneumonia kicked my butt)
09: Untitled/Unknown
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Nov 6, 2009 - 17 09
gedit: full screen, spell check, word count and tabs...lots and lots of tabs (lol)