Best of Mac: The Best Text Editors On The Planet.

gp said:

VI IS IN THE TOP WORST???! 

Wow. 

While I will concede that Vi has a very steep learning curve, it is by far, not a bad text editor.  And, if you’re going to beat on Vi, how come you don’t mention emacs? 

I’ve been through this time and again with people at work.  I watch then struggle with Vi (Vim, really), then curse a little, ultimately falling back to something simplistic like nano, or just plain old text editors like textedit, gedit, or notepad.  But, they soon try Vi again, and again, and again…finally, they actually use the vimtutor program on the command line.  They actually take the 10-20 minutes it takes to get past the fact they actually have to be engaged enough to read something, learn the steps it takes to navigate the program, and viola.  A new die-hard Vi user is born.  Then months go by, and they invariably look back and say, “...wow, I wish all text editors were as powerful and easy to use as Vi!!!”

You should give it a shot - no really!  Actually learn to use something before getting frustrated with it, kicking your feet, and screaming at it before publicly degrading it in front of millions of internet goers.  Isn’t being fair and objective what an adult should do when evaluating things in life? 

Let’s stop teaching our children that everything they do should be easy, and that learning something new (or really, actually taking the time to do so and not being part of the lazy, instant gratification generations we are breeding these days) doesn’t always come with little to no effort. 

Learning Vi (and I’m sure emacs, too) is WELL worth the rewards in the end, once the learning curve is scaled…

For windows and linux, you can always get a free copy of gvim if you need a gui…and those wonderful people from google have provided a native mac port called macvim. 

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

GP