3
Looking for perfect suckless text editor
(lemmy.world)
I'm all seriousness, I was looking into this today, and stumbled upon this page. 9 Best Text Editors for the Linux Command Line obviously skip vim, neovim, and emacs. Hope it helps!
Hard to tell what you want but maybe /bin/ed . I use zile now and then fwiw.
How ed is for programming? It looks interesting. If you're saying about zile I tried mg and it looks great but I can't display or type some characters from my native language, I think that it will be same with zile. I think that good idea would be to use mg with ed, for example write most of the code in mg, but fixing needed letters in ed.
I don't know the unicode situation with ed. It is pretty minimal. There is also GNU Nano which I've never learned how to use. Ed is a line based editor, not screen oriented. I've programmed with it (back in the day) but these days I use Emacs for everything except minimal tweaks.
Helix? I've never noticed a security problem.
I really don't get your reasoning, but I recommend helix (because I recommend it to everybody).
It's a pleasure to use, and it's... also not widespread or old enough to have any reported CVE ;)
Oh, it's written rust IIRC, so it probably doesn't suckless.
I recommend you get right with using vim or its forks.
Why is Vim a security hole?
Haha, I don't know how, it's just text editor so it shouldn't have any CVE. But it have a lot of them, just check on internet.
Any program that takes in input has a greater chance of bugs that may result in security vulnerabilities. And I should hope that a text editor can take inputs...
Please define suckless. See on under suckless.org one can find rocking software, meaning suckless alternatives not developed/maintained by them, and on the editors section I see:
- acme - Rob Pike's framing text editor for Plan 9. Included in plan9port.
- ed - ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!
- ired - A minimalist hexadecimal editor and bindiffer for p9, w32 and *nix.
- mg - A portable version of mg.
- mle - A small, flexible console text editor.
- nano - A pico clone - this is small simple code and easy to use.
- neatvi - A minimal vi implementation supporting bidirectional UTF-8
- nextvi - A continuation of neatvi development with more features.
- nvi - A small, multiple file vi-alike.
- micro - A terminal text editor, written in go with common key bindings like ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste.
- sam - An editor by Rob Pike with inspiration from ed.
- sim - The sim text editor. Based on vim and sam.
- traditional vi - A fixed version of the original vi.
- vim (With the GUI, use :set go+=c to kill popup dialogs). It can be compiled to be as minimal as possible (see vim-tiny in Debian repos).
- vis - A modern, legacy free, simple yet efficient vim-like editor.
- wily - An acme clone for POSIX.
That said, also note there's an emacs-nox package available in most distros, which only includes the editor able to run on a terminal emulator, if emacs OS is too much. And can you share URLs justifying why vim is a big security hole? BTW I don't see neovim as part of the suckless.org/rocks software. What is suckless depends a lot about what one might consider it to be, even though there might be some common characteristics that can be recognized as not good such as bloated, too big code base and so on.
Zed.
nvim? Or do you want graphical? Then maybe xed or gedit?
Or very simple like nano? Or just vi?
Kate?
nano?
I'm looking for something more powerful.
It's what I'm using for right now and I was using in the past also. It would be great to add emacs or vi/vim emulation into micro.
You just said you don't like Emacs.
neo vim.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
3 points (61.5% liked)
Linux
62524 readers
547 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS