Many Cygwin Text Editors
One of the greatest advantages of using Cygwin is the vast array of softwares at your disposal. There is a lot of choice, perhaps too much of choice. And we will have to get used to that.
Take text editors for instance. A text editor is a very basic software and there has been such evolution in them. Line editors, text editors, GUI editors,… and with various advanced features.
ed is the GNU line editor. cat used to concatenate files can be seen as an editor as well.
Joe, Pico and Nano are screen editors with more features than the plain line editors. They allow one to jump to specified line and column numbers, search and replace strings, and allow quick, dirty editing.
Vim (Vi Improved) and Emacs are two legendary editors, the followers of each of which inadvertently take part in the Editor War sometimes without even the knowledge that they are part of a rivalry larger than themselves. While diehard fans of Vim and Emacs claim that their editors are the most advanced and convenient, they are both capable of keeping new users at bay thanks to their apparent complexity which is supposed to contribute to their simplicity. Both of them are screen editors which are used by programmers to write programs in a number of languages. Gvim and Xemacs are the GUI counterparts of the editors. One thing I have noticed is that users of either software need a cheat sheet that has various key combinations that can be used in their daily usage. Let this not daunt you from using these, because they really are worth the struggle. You can get started with Vim and Emacs using tutorials and they are plenty of them.
NEdit, short for Nice Editor, is a GUI text editor.
In case you already use a text editor that you are comfortable with, you can continue to use it from command line in Cygwin itself. Add your text editor with a custom alias in your .profile:
alias editor=”/c/\”Program Files/Editors & Viewers\”/Notepad++/notepad++.exe”
I am a Notepad++ fan and find it very resourceful. I have a feeling that it is inspired from Vim while keeping user-friendliness in mind.
For a greater choice than above, check out this comparison of text editors.
