HACKER Q&A
📣 chefandy

What's your favorite lightweight utility text editor?


I've been a dedicated Vim user for over 25 years. The keybindings and commands are ingrained in my muscle memory. However, my daily work has shifted to JetBrains IDEs, and I use Obsidian for personal notes. Neither are great options for general lightweight GUI text editing tasks – editing config files, modifying a little pasted text, etc. GVim has been my go-to for decades, but the less I use it as a coding environment, the more I forget its little quirks in configuration and workflow-- I guess I've become a bit spoiled by modern UI niceties. I've decided to move on.

I'm looking for a modern off-the-shelf replacement that's snappy, isn't totally user-hostile, and ideally FOSS-- but I'll happily pay for a truly exceptional product. I'm looking for simple from the usability perspective: anything that involves multiple plugins or significant text configuration rather than having menu-based as-needed options will be a tough sell. I need at least rudimentary syntax highlighting and I'd love vim keybindings.

What lightweight text editor do you swear by? What makes it stand out from the rest? Do you think it might fit my use case? Why or why not?

  👤 muditmudit Accepted Answer ✓
Sublime Text (https://www.sublimetext.com) has been my goto for years.

In my experience, it is very lightweight, opens large files quickly, and the multi-cursor support is second to none.

I often use it "between" apps, meaning I use it to inspect and massage texts before pasting it somewhere else (e.g., logs from Grafana to JIRA, etc.).

With a few customizations and a few "Packages", it can even function as a (very) basic IDE. These days, it is my primary golang IDE.

👤 talldayo
Give Helix a whirl: https://helix-editor.com/

It's a nice modal editor. Kinda feels like a halfway-point between Vim, Emacs and VS-Code.

👤 eternityforest
I use VSCode for everything. It's fast enough to take the place of a simple lightweight editor if you already have it running all day.

I have not used the Vim bindings but I hear people like them.

👤 solardev
Sublime Text is my preference for ye old text files, wayward JSONs, yaml stuff, etc. It's light and fast with basic syntax highlighting. It's not an IDE and doesn't have great code following or refactoring, but for anything complex I just open up Jetbrains anyway.
👤 meristohm
I use whatever comes default with Linux Mint (Xed? Nano?), because it's fast and all I want to do is type plaintext and name & save the file.
👤 pwg
Joe's Own Editor:

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/