Text Editors

My favourite code editor for my works is Emacs. But Emacs is slower to start compare to other lightweight text editors, such as Mousepad, Gedit, Featherpad, etc, because it involves a lot of plugins/packages.

I always need text editor for some quick and temporary notetaking. Atom is not a good solution to me, because it is too bloat, depends on Electron.

The following features are what I need

• Drag and drop to open file
• Horizontal scroll by mouse scroll
• Open files from last session, and resume the cursor
• Syntax highlighting
• Multiple tabs
• Can disable append newline at the end of file

The following is the list of text editors that I found fulfilling above requirement.

• mousepad
• code (pantheon-code)
• medit
• kate

I also tried several other text editors,

• Featherpad – is quite nice, but the tabs is not persistent. Whenever I run Featherpad, the position of the tabs will be changed.
• Notepadqq – doesn’t resume the cursor
• Textadept – modern, lightweight, but the tabs are not intuitive, not able to drag and drop or middle-click to close
• gedit, leafpad, l3afpad, pluma, Kwrite – not able to open last files when start
• jEdit – it was my main text editor before I switch to Emacs. It is not in official Arch Linux repositories
• Atom – too bloat

I did test some other text editors, but not mentioning here.

Other than above text editors, there are several text editors which I installed, though seldom use.

• joe – It is super fast to edit large file
• gvim (vim) – vim is my default console text editor
• Visual Studio Code – Necessary (recommended) for Godot C# development
• neovim