Simple linux console text editor wanted [closed]

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I'm a linux newbie coming from a Windows background and I am trying to find a simple full-screen console-based plain-text editor. Something that emulates the look and feel of the Windows edit.com would be perfect.

Specifically, I'm looking for;

• A plain text editor.
• Console-based not GUI-based.
• Full-screen not command line.
• Menus to tell me what my options are. I don't want to have to find out and remember a complex set of keystrokes specific to that one application.
• An application that is in the default apt-get / yum repositories, or failing that is easy for a newbie to install.

I'm using small-footprint versions of Ubuntu 904 and Centos 5.5.

edit:

I suppose what I'm looking for is a console editor that conforms to the normal keystrokes used by GUI editors, ie. cursor keys to move up/down/left/right, pg-up / pg-down keys to move up and down a page, home / end keys to move to the start or end of a line etc etc. In other words, the keys we all use without thinking, in any GUI environment, be it Windows or Linux.

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mcedit

@mpapis I got mcedit going and learned a lot in the process. For the benefit of other linux newbies I would like to share what I learned.

This is how I installed mcedit on my system which is a Centos 5.5 minimum build running in a VPS.

Starting mcedit

To start mcedit from a console, do;

mcedit

If mcedit is installed it will start and your screen will look like the screenshot above. But if you get an error message like;

No such file or directory

then you need to install mcedit.

Installing mcedit

mcedit is part of a package called mc. To install mcedit you must install mc. To install mc do;

apt-get install mc

If apt-get knows about mc, then you will be asked a question like;

After this operation, 17.4MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Go ahead and install it by pressing the 'y' key then then the 'enter' key.

But if you get an error message like;

 Package mc has no installation candidate

then apt-get doesn't know about mc, so you have to tell apt-get about mc. mc is stored in the universe repository. To tell apt-get about mc, you need to tell apt-get where the universe repository is. The universe repository is a popular and safe ubuntu repository.

Tell apt-get about the universe repository

The /etc/apt/sources.list file tells apt-get what repositories are where. You can view sources.list by doing;

more /etc/apt/sources.list

For apt-get to know about the universe repository, the sources.list file must contain the line;

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty universe 

Add the above line to the sources.list file by doing;

echo deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty universe >> /etc/apt/sources.list

The ">>" means append the preceding text to the specified file.

To check whether the above has worked, show sources.list by doing;

more /etc/apt/sources.list

If it worked, the last line of the file will be;

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty universe

Now tell apt-get about the change you just made to the sources.list file by doing;

apt-get update

You should see;

Reading package lists... Done

So you can now do;

apt-get install mc

Then run mcedit by doing;

mcedit

And you should see the screenshot above.

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pico or nano should do fine - joe is also pretty straight forward. vi/vim and emacs have somewhat of a learning curve, but both are worth the invested time.

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For the "GUI-shortcuts", try Diakonos editor (it is in the repositories). One of the author's goals is actually to provide similar keyboard-shortcuts interface, so that ^O, ^S, ^W, F1 etc do exactly what you would expect from a GUI editor.

Another good choice is jed (also in the repositories). It has emacs-like shortcuts, but it also has a menu row, allowing to visually navigate through commands (and the menu also does show the shortcuts). Jed also has some nice features for programmers. Overall, I like jed more than diakonos - give it a try.

It is also worth mentioning that almost always keyboard shortcuts are configurable. That is still an inconvenience (esp. when working with multiple PCs), but an option.

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I'm a big fan of mcedit it is shipped with Midnight Commander a Total Commander like file manager, additionally in the package you get mcview for viewing files with multiple options.