Installation

There are no official packages (yet) for Ubuntu, so if you want to install Qute, the fastest way for any distribution is the official website. Download the file, decompress it, and launch the executable “Qute”. A first good point about it: Qute is pretty small and can be easily installed or put on a USB drive. However, do take note that some advanced features may require an extra package called PANDOC.

Features

What I like about Qute is that it has everything that you expect a light text editor to have, plus some advanced features and the eye candy that I promised you earlier.

It uses the standard UTF-8 format for encoding plain text files, and there is a full screen mode, as well as a split screen view. So far, everything is as expected. The shortcuts are also the same as in the common word editors: “Ctrl+s” to save, or F11 to go to full screen view. Notice, however, that the undo and the redo features are still not stable and that the results may vary.

In terms of visual interface, Qute comes with a lot of customization, like different backgrounds and fonts. You can choose to work on a wooden or on a dark gray background.

The menu is very smooth and fluid. You can open it via the escape key, or by clicking on the top left corner. Except for this, there are no apparent buttons or extra fields. Qute is very Spartan in terms of menus, but it’s a delight for the eyes.

Qute comes with some advanced and experimental features. One of my favorites is the fact that you can switch between the editing and the visual mode independently from paragraph to paragraph. This means that you don’t need to render or publish the whole file to see what it will look like in the end. To edit a paragraph, simply click on it. You then have to double-click again to switch back to the visual mode.

Qute also supports Tex, which means that you can write and edit Maths formulas pretty easily. It is then possible to export the file to a plethora of formats, amazingly for such a little editor: plain text, clipboard, HTML, PDF, LaTex, etc.

Finally, the program presents an experimental function: the ability to define your own language via OMeta syntax. I am not very familiar with this feature, and it is still in development, but so far, the demo shows how a user will be able to construct his or her own custom markup language.

Conclusion

As a final word, I will say that Qute is pretty convincing for an early version. It still lacks a little of stability and some functions like undo, but I am pretty seduced by its appearance already. On a side note, the project is under AGPL license; the source is on github, and developers and contributors are welcome if they want to help and bring the last features to life.

What do you think of Qute? Are you seduced or repelled by its characteristics? Do you know another similar text editor? Please let us know in the comments.

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It is exactly for that reason that I started using Vim a few years ago. Traditionally, Vim is placed in conflict with the legendary Emacs. I confess that I know very little about Emacs, but what you have to know about these two text editors is that they can both be fully customized, and very confusing at first. This tutorial will not explain everything about Vim but will try to give you the basics to use it correctly in the first place, and then present a few tips that will (I hope) allow you to learn on your own.

Vim comes from “VI iMproved”. Vi is a non-graphical text editor widely distributed in Unix systems. It comes by default with Linux. Vim is an enhancement of this original editor. However, unlke Vi, Vim is not installed by default on every distribution.

Installation

To install Vim on Ubuntu, use the command:

sudo apt-get install vim

If you are already interested in some plugins, use the command:

sudo apt-cache search vim

This will give you a long list of packages related to Vim. Among them are some for various programming languages, addon managers, etc.

For this tutorial, I will be using the latest version of Vim (7.3.154) on Ubuntu. You can use any other version though.

Warming Up

Type the command vim in a terminal. You should see a nice welcome screen.

And if you’ve never used Vi or Vim before, it is very likely that you don’t even know how to exit… Yes, it’s true. None of the shortcuts you normally use will work in Vim.

First of all, to use any menu-type function like save or exit, your command should begin with a colon (:). Saving is :w and quitting is :q. If you want to quit a file without saving, use the force quit command :q!. A cool thing with Vim is that you don’t have to type commands separately. In other words, if you want to save and then quit, you can directly use :wq.

So for now, quit Vim and open it on a sample text file. Simply add the name of the text file that you want to edit after the command:

vim [text file name]

By default, when you open a text file, you are in visual mode. It is quite specific to Vim and confusing at the beginning. Vim is composed mainly of two modes: visual and editing. The visual mode is for viewing a text and using some commands. To go into editing mode, just press i to insert and a to add some text. To go back into the visual mode and access all the menu-type functions, press the “Escape” key. The difference between insertion and addition is simply whether you want the text you type to appear before or after the cursor in visual mode. To understand this fully, you should really try it yourself. My advice is: add at the end of lines, and insert in other cases.

To move the cursor within a text, whether you are in visual or editing mode, you can generally use the keyboard arrows. A real purist would tell you to use the keys h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right.

Now that you are warmed up and know how to control Vim at a basic level, let’s go to the core.

A few basic commands

Now that you master the transformation from visual to editing mode, here are a few commands that you can use in visual mode:

• x: to delete a character
• u: to undo an action (the equivalent of Ctrl+z)
• dd: to delete a line
• dw: to delete a word
• yy: to copy a line
• yw: to copy a word
• p: to paste the previously deleted or copied line or word
• e : to move to the next word (faster than just moving with the arrow keys)
• r: to replace a letter (press r, then the new letter)

And of course, there are more, but this is enough for now. If you master all of them, you will already be very fluent with Vim.

As a side note for those who always want more, you can type a number before any of these commands and the command will be executed that number of times. For example, 5x will delete five characters in a row, while 3p will paste three times.

Advanced Commands

Finally, as a bonus and an appetizer for your own research, here are a few advanced and very useful commands:

• /searched_word : to search for a word within the text
• :sp name_of_a_text_file: will split the screen in half horizontally, showing the new text file in the other half. To shift the focus from the right to the left window, use the shortcut Ctrl+w

• :vsp name_of_a_text_file: same as before, but splits the screen vertically
• Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V: to copy and paste text in a terminal
• :! name_of_a_command: to launch a command external to Vim, directly into your shell. For example, :! ls will display the files within the directory you are currently working in, without quitting the editor

Conclusion

I think you now have every tool you need to start using Vim. You can go even further by installing the various plugins, editing the .vimrc file, or even using the interactive tutor by typing the command vimtutor.

If you have any other commands that you would like to share about Vim, please let us know in the comments.

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Installation

If you are using Ubuntu, Scribes is already available in the repository. You can easily install it by clicking here, or through the Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager. If you prefer command line:

sudo apt-get install scribes

For other distro, you can download the source code here.

Distraction Free Interface

When you first run Scribes, you will be surprised to see an empty window with no menu bar, side panel and statusbar. This is the distraction free interface of Scribes. The menu bar is hidden by default. When you maximize Scribes to the full screen, there won’t be anything else to distract you.

At the top-right corner of the window is a red glow. When you hover your mouse over the red glow, the menu bar will appear.

The menubar is also minimal with only a few icons. You can open new files or rename the file, and there is no Save button. Scribes comes with an autosave feature, so you don’t have to worry about losing your work. The most important button in the menubar is the Customization button as this is the place you will be spending most time on initially.

The Preferences option allows you to customize the display style (font, tab width, text wrapping etc) for each language. It supports multiple languages, ranging from plain text, HTML, Java, C++, Objective C, PHP, Ruby, Python to VB.net, and you can configure the display style for them all.

Themes support

The default theme in Scribes is dark in color with grey background and white text. For those who dislike this theme, Scribes allows you to change the theme to one that is soothing to your eyes. If the themes in the library is not sufficient, you can even download extra themes from the Scribes site.

Template Editor (Snippet)

The template editor is the most powerful feature in Scribes, allowing the developers to simplify the coding process and avoid writing repetitive codes. By default, the template section is empty for all languages. You can download an existing template from the Scribes site and import them in.

The template snippet works by triggering a keyword. You enter a trigger text (such as “else”) and press “Tab”. It will then replace the trigger text with the code that you predefined (such as:

if( )
{ 
}else 
{}

Other features of Scribes

• Auto completion of previously typed words (no code autocompletion)
• Syntax highlighting for 43 programming and scripting languages.
• Automatic correction and replacement.
• Automatic indentation.
• Spell checking
• Bookmark specific lines in the document.
• Plenty of keyboard shortcuts
• Supports zen coding

Conclusion

As a minimalist text editor, Scribes has done incredibly well. It may not have the bells and whistles of the heaveyweight Dreamweaver, but it does have some killer features that can knock the Goliath off its seat. Scribes is rather extreme in its design, bringing the concept of minimalism to the next level. It may not be suitable for everyone, but I am sure for those who love it, they swear by it.

What about you? Do you love or hate it?

Scribes

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One of the way to change it is to directly edit the wp-admin.css file under the “wp-admin -> css” folder. This is not a good solution because the next time you upgrade your WordPress, your files will be overwritten.

The best way is to insert a small function to your functions.php.

Open your functions.php file in your Themes folder.

Add the following code to the end of the file:

add_action( 'admin_head-post.php', 'fix_html_editor_font' );
add_action( 'admin_head-post-new.php', 'fix_html_editor_font' );
 
function fix_html_editor_font() { ?>
    <style type="text/css">
        #editorcontainer #content, #wp_mce_fullscreen {
            font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;
        }
    </style>
<?php }

You can change the font-family to the one you like. I personally prefer the Tahoma and Verdana font family.

Save and upload the functions.php file back to the server. This is the result:

That’s it.

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There is a free and much simpler solution. That solution is an app called Compositions. Let’s take a better look at the software.

Compositions is visually simple. You won’t find a detailed user interface or a lot of special features in the software. That is part of the design as it is meant to keep you focused. To some of you, that may be a turn off. We live in the age of multitasking and most of us hope to find a tool that does everything. That is possible. You can find tools that offer just about every feature under the sun but you have to ask yourself, can they do it all and do it well?

Compositions only set out to do one thing – allow you to create multiple drafts of documents, and save them so that no matter what changes you make, information isn’t lost in the shuffle. The way that you do that is by taking what the software calls “snapshots“. These snapshots save your document the way it was and allow you to continue working on the document. When you save the document again, the snapshots are saved with it, and you will have access to both the current and previous incarnations of your document.

Saving a snapshot is simple. You simply choose “File” and then “Save snapshot”. If you don’t like the changes you’ve made to your document, you can simply choose “Revert to saved” in order to bring your document back to the way it was before. Unlike the common Undo feature found in many word processors, this will alter all of the changes you’ve made since the last save, not simply the last change. It also works if you close a document and reopen it at a later date, which is handy if you end up with typer’s remorse.

Sync to Dropbox

Other than snapshot, Compositions is also able to keep your documents in sync via Dropbox. Be it in Mac or iOS devices (yes, Compositions is available for iOS devices as well), you can always have the latest version of your documents in hand.

In short, Compositions is a minimal text editor with snapshot feature. It may seems simple and basic, but the snapshot feature is one of the most powerful feature around, and it is particularly useful if you need to save plenty of drafts. On the whole, the software does exactly what it promises and has a spell check that is surprisingly diligent for a third party piece of software. It’s a strong option for anyone who need to keep focus and has a new multiple drafts.

Compositions [iTunes app store link]

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But, since that is really a far fetched thought, I  decided to spend some thinking of the best ways to make my workflow as a web developer as editor agnostic as possible.

And what did I come up with ?

Online Code Editors. These are editors that run online and are available from any computer anywhere in the world. So, without further ado, here is a list of some of my favorite online editors.

1. Kodingen

The people behind Kodingen call it the cloud development environment. It is an IDE for the cloud, and I absolutely agree with them. Kodingen integrates an image editor, a really excellent code editor and a lot of nifty features into one cool looking package. It displays line numbers, features syntax highlighting and SVN integration. The only hitch is that they’re still in Beta and are only letting limited people through.

2. EditArea

EditArea is a free and open source Javascript based editor that can be hosted on your own server. It offers syntax highlighting, search and replace support, multi language support and a number of other features that you’d expect from a first class editor.

3. Bespin

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs project that aims to create an editor for web development that can be embedded into webpages, much like EditArea. It is based on some of the latest emerging standards such as HTML 5 and so you’d need a fairly recent browser if you’re going to use Bespin. Like Mozilla’s web browser – Firefox, Bespin is designed to be easily extensible using plugins developed in Javascript. In fact, the editor is so good that the guys behind Kodingen also provide an option to use Bespin as one of the editors for their IDE.

4. Amy Editor

Using Amy Editor feels as if you’re using a OS X based desktop application as that is where this editor get it’s visual cues from. Apart from that, Amy Editor is probably one of the most feature rich editors in this roundup. It has support for opening multiple files in different tabs, syntax highlighting support for multiple languages and let’s you manage multiple projects from within the editor. Oh, and there is some basic debugging support present too.

5. PHPAnywhere

PHPAnywhere is one editor that could easily replace my current PHP programming needs without much effort. For one, it comes with a built-in FTP editor that lets me edit files directly on my server. It also has excellent syntax highlighting and project management features. What more could a PHP programmer ask for ?

Those were some of my favorite Online Code Editors. Do you guys use any online editors for your needs ? Do you find them useful ? Let us know in the comments.

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Kate is a multi-document interface (MDI) text editor, available for both KDE 3 and 4. It runs on multiple Linux and Unix-like platforms, Mac OS X, and  Windows. It also includes a component called KatePart, which runs inside numerous other KDE applications, including Quanta+ (on KDE 3 only), KWrite, Konqueror, and Kdevelop. Kate provides syntax highlighting for over 120 text formats, making it perfect for whatever programming language you choose.

HTML Editing

Kate will highlight HTML markup and underline errors, particularly when you forget to close a tag.  It will also group text within tags, so that you can see what content is where. It will display folding markers, small arrows on the side, that you can use to collapse or expand a tag and its contents. To toggle folding markers, press F9. For that reason, if you are coding in XHTML, make sure to use the XML highlighting rather than HTML.  It will then appropriately mark single tags that are not closed with arrows.

To enable XML highlighting:

1. Click Tools in the main menu
2. Navigate to “Highlighting”, “Markup”, and finally to “XML”.

You can also do the same for PHP and other web scripting languages. Kate will generally highlight all of these, so you can usually leave the settings at the default.

Kate includes a dynamic word wrap feature, useful for documents with large amounts of text. Toggle it on or off with F10. Press F11 to toggle line numbers, and you will notice that a wrapped line has symbols indicating that it is still part of the previous line.

Multiple Documents

With Kate, you can edit multiple documents at once. The left-hand column will display the list of currently opened files, and you can move through them by clicking on the file you want to edit, by clicking the forward or back buttons, or by holding the Alt key and pressing the left or right arrow. Control+S will save your current document, and Control+L will save all open documents.

Sessions

Kate has a handy feature called “Sessions” that allows you to pick up work right where you left off the last time you were editing. For example, you might have eight documents for a particular project. Rather than having to open each document one at a time every time you want to work on them, you can save a Kate session that will automatically open those documents when activated. To save a session:

1. Click Sessions
2. Click Save As…
3. Give your session a name.

The next time you want to return to that project, just open the session you saved.

Remote Editing

There are times when you need to edit a document quickly right on the server. While you could SSH into the server and use whatever text editor is available from the command line, you will miss some of the many benefits of Kate. Furthermore, if you have a shared hosting account, you might not even have access to SSH.  With Kate, you can open a document live on the server via FTP, SFTP, and any other protocol supported by KDE. To accomplish this, do the following:

1. Login to your web server using the normal method. You can use Dolphin or Konqueror.
2. Navigate to the folder containing the file you want to edit.
3. Right click on the file and open it with Kate.
4. Repeat those steps for multiple files if necessary.

Find

Kate’s find feature is very useful with long documents. To activate it, press Control-F. It will open a dialog at the bottom of the window. You can find each instance individually and scroll through the results with the “Next” and “Previous” buttons, or click “Options” and “Highlight all” to see all results highlighted at once.

Click the arrow on the far right to expand the find dialog further, and it will add a “replace” feature. With it you can find a tag or piece of content and replace every instance of it with something else or nothing at all.  Kate will also remember your searches so that you can perform them again by pressing the down arrow on the right side of the search box.

I have only touched the surface of the many features available in Kate. The best way to find out exactly what Kate can offer you is to try it out for yourself. I highly recommend it, not only for KDE users, but for anyone. Kate is available through any Linux distribution that offers KDE.

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1. Front-end Editor

The Front-end Editor plugin allows you to make changes without having to go to the WordPress built-in editor. It’s a great tool if you have already created and published your blog and just want to make quick edits. It’s great for making edits that do not require any significant changes. However, it’s not really a standalone-type of editor. It’s more to use alongside another one. It doesn’t have any additional features to add to the WordPress built-in editor, but it is nice to have something that doesn’t require you to go to the WordPress administrative area.

2. TinyMCE Advanced

The TinyMCE Advanced plugin adds 16 buttons to the WordPress built-in editor. One of the great things about it is that it’s easy to drag-and-drag the buttons in and out of the window. Therefore, you are able to choose what buttons to have accessible to you when creating or editing a post. You are also able to add your current theme’s CSS stylesheet, so you are able to visualize how the post will look like when you are done.

3.  Dean’s FCKEditor For WordPress

Dean’s FCKEditor For WordPress plugin enhances your WordPress built-in editor by providing desktop-word-processing-type of editor. Out of all the editors, this one has the most functionality. Other than the basic word processing features: formatting, styles, find/replace, printing, etc, it comes with a built-in file and upload manager. In addition, it integrates well with the WordPress default media manager and also allows you to insert flash movie and smiley icons into your post.

The plugin also provides you three templates that help in creating your blog posts. It’s definitely worth looking at, if you don’t want to download a desktop blog editor.

4.  WP Super Edit

Just like the above-mentioned plugins, the WP Super Edit plugin allows you to add plenty of additional functionality to your default text editor. Like TinyMCE Advacned, it allows you to add extra buttons (and hence more functionality) to your toolbar. What is more important is that it provides a way for you to arrange your toolbar according to the user role. Now, you can restrict your subscriber or contributor to only a limited set of toolbar while the author or users with higher level of permission to access to the full range of functionality.

In addition, there are also a whole lot of useful HTML tags (like DIV, STYLE, TABLE etc) that you can use in your post. This is particularly useful for coders/developers.

WP Super Edit allows bloggers to control the editor better than the other two. Additionally, it has more features than the other two. However, it can be tedious adding buttons and arranging them in a way that makes sense. It would be easier if they start with all the buttons, and allow users to remove the ones they do not need.

5. Custom TinyMCE

The Custom TinyMCE plugin provides the same type of functionality as the WP Super Edit and TinyMCE Advanced plugins.  However, it lacks the flexibility that the latter provides bloggers. You are able to go into the administrative panel and check the check boxes of the buttons you would like to appear in the your editor. It’s much easier to navigate in that aspect.

However, if you choose the majority or all of the buttons, instead of going to two or more lines, they are just kept in one line. This causes a visual problem because you will have to search for the functionality you are seeking. Furthermore, it also disappears behind the sidebar. It’s a good plugin if you want to add a couple of more buttons to your editor. If you want to add more than that, then this plugin is not for you.

What other WordPress plugins do you use to enhance your text-editor?

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