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Comment by vintermann

I still miss NEdit.

Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices.

One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times!), using the phone etc.

So here's this system that demands I need to learn basic text editing all over? Nope, not joining that cult! We Amiga kids had had graphical editors for a long time!

So I got the best modern text editor Linux had at the time, NEdit from fermilab. It was almost entirely CUA + the conventions we use today (which aren't entirely what we used in 2001). And the unusual features it had, such as square selection and X-style middle click copying, were quick to pick up. It was also tiny, both in binary size and memory footprint.

Sadly it didn't really survive the switch to utf-8. I switched to Slava Pestov's Jedit for many years, and did some cool things with its huge library of extensions. But when VSCode started doing IDE stuff better than most IDEs, I defected to that. Yes yes, electron, Microsoft, I know... but it's just so damn convenient.

parent vintermann 2 months ago

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