We use a lot of text editors during our day to day job. From compiling some small program on a remote server or our own machine, to writing code for some giant application. In Linux, there are no shortage of good text editors.
Here’s the best Linux text editor including graphical and terminal based editors.
GNU Emacs
There’s a good chance that Emacs will be one of your favorite Linux text editors. It has been around for a long time. GNU Emacs, created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, is its most popular version that’s used by developers and Linux enthusiasts all across the world.
There’s a good chance that Emacs will be one of your favorite Linux text editors. It has been around for a long time. GNU Emacs, created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, is its most popular version that’s used by developers and Linux enthusiasts all across the world.
Written in Lisp and C programming language, this free software is extensible using a Turing complete programming language. The users of GNU Emacs also enjoy extensive documentation and tutorial support. There’s also the availability of extensions like debugger interface, mail, and news.
The latest release of this free/libre text editor is GNU Emacs 27.2. For more information, visit this link.
Installing Emacs
sudo apt-get install emacs
Bluefish – Linux HTML Editor
If you are a newbie in the world of Linux web developers, then Bluefish Linux code editor can be a great choice. Bluefish is a code editor designed for various operating systems like Linux, Mac-OS, Windows, Solaris, and other Linux distros.
This best Linux HTML editor offers some great and advanced features such as support of integrating external programs, auto-completing tags and classes, auto-indentation, installing additional plug-ins, etc. This Linux code editor has a neat and clean, lightweight graphical user interface, which helps beginners start coding on Linux.
Unlike other best code editors of Linux, it also supports multiple external programs such as Lint, Web-lint, XML-lint, Javac, Tidy. One very important feature of this fantastic code editor is auto-recoverer the data after a certain system crashes or shutdown.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:klaus-vormweg/bluefish sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install bluefish
CodeLite – Linux Code Editor
CodeLite is an IDE that is free, open-source, and supports cross-platform. This code editor offers some most used programming languages like C, C++, PHP, and JavaScript. CodeLite is developed, keeping in mind the widely used platforms such as Windows, macOS-X, and Linux.
This code editor for Linux has some great and useful features like refactoring, source control plugins, code navigation, etc. It supports the RAD (Rapid Application Development) Tool, LLDB Next Generation Debugger, several compilers, shows errors as code glossary, and much more.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eugenesan/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install codelite -y
How to Remove
sudo apt-get remove codelite -y
Eclipse – IDE
Eclipse is one of the best open-source, cross-platform Linux code editors in today’s programming world. This widely used IDE offers its users a great GUI with support for drag and drops functionality for the easy and quick composition of UI elements. With source navigation, Eclipse also supports syntax highlighting.
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This app provides several knowledge tools, including Call-graph, Type-hierarchy, Built-in Browser, etc. It supports folding and hyperlink navigation. Users can do a project and edit later on easily. Visual debugging is also possible with this amazing code editor.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
- First, install Ubuntu make on your system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make sudo apt update sudo apt install ubuntu-make
- Run the following command for Eclipse IDE for Java Developers:
umake ide eclipse
- Run the following command for Eclipse IDE for Java Enterprise edition Developers:
umake ide eclipse-jee
- Run the following command for Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developer:
umake ide eclipse-cpp
- Run the following command for Eclipse for PHP Developers:
umake ide eclipse-php
Micro – Terminal-based Text Editor
Micro is a command line-based text editor built to be easy and intuitive enough for users to take advantage of the features in other terminal-based text editors without the steep learning curve.
Micro’s feature highlights include:
- Mouse support
- Multiple cursors
- Terminal emulation
- High customizability
- Plugin system
- Static library with no dependencies
You can easily install micro in your Linux distribution by running the following installation script.
$ curl https://getmic.ro | bash
Brackets Text Editor
Brackets is a modern free and open-source code editor created by Adobe with a focus on web development. It is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to offer web developers a rich code editing experience with the ability to extend its native features using several free extensions.
Brackets features include:
- A beautiful User Interface
- Preprocessor support for SCSS and LESS
- Inline editors
- Live preview
- Multiple tabbed editing
- PHP support
- Supports Language Server Protocol
- Support for plugin extensions
You can install Brackets editor in Linux systems using snap package manager as shown.
$ sudo snap install brackets
Lite Editor
Lite is a new text editor mostly developed in the Lua language, that aims to offer something practical, pleasing, tiny and fast, created as simply as possible; easy to alter and expand, or to use without doing either.
Atom – Linux code editor
Atom is a free and open-source text editor that’s developed by GitHub. Based on Electron (CoffeeScript, JS, Less, HTML), it’s a desktop application built using web technologies. Often being called the text editor of the 21st century, it’s a modern text editor that’s hackable to the core.
Atom is a Linux code editor that is smart, trendy, approachable, and yet customizable to the core. This excellent Linux text editor offers you to customize it to do anything you want. With cross-platform editing features, built-in package manager, smart and modern autocompletion tags feature, and file system browser, this one denotes as one of the best code editors for Linux. It also supports multiple panes and finds and replace functions.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install atom
How to Remove
sudo apt remove --purge atom
Ash Editor
ash is a plain and clean command line-based text editor, that designed to be easy to use with modern key-bindings and it is efficient enough to manage a large number of files simultaneously and has a broad array of modern features.
Sublime Text 3 – An Amazing Text Editor
Sublime Text 3 for Ubuntu is an amazing text editor for coding, markup, and style. Sublime Text Editor allows for code highlighting and better presentation. It also has a custom regex engine that significantly speeds up file indexing and loading.
The command palette feature of the sublime code editor offers access to frequently used features like sorting, changing the arrangement, and changing the indentation settings. Sublime Text is highly customizable. You can customize everything with simple JSON files such as Menus, Macros, Key Bindings, Snippets, Completions, etc.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
wget -qO - https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add - echo "deb https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-text.list sudo apt update sudo apt install sublime-text
How to Remove
sudo apt-get remove sublime-text sudo apt-get autoremove
4. Vim (Free – GNU Compatible) Code Editor
Vim is one of the most successful and best code editors of UNIX. Vim is most likely the same as the Vi, but it has better features than it. Vim is a highly customizable Linux text editor built to create and change any text very effectively.
You can edit or create your Linux software with this easily. This Linux code editor supports multiple plugins and hundreds of old and modern file formats and programming languages.
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vim sudo apt update sudo apt install vim
How to Remove
sudo apt remove vim sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:jonathonf/vim
Gedit – Integrated Development Environment
Gedit is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), preinstalled as the default code editor for the GNOME desktop environment on Linux. This Linux text editor is created for general purposes and aims at efficiency and simplicity. Gedit came into the light in 2000; first release, while written in C programming language.
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This open source free Text Editor comes with complete support for the internationalized text. Gedit offers you customizable syntax, highlighting several widely used programming languages such as C, C++, HTML, JavaScript, XML, Python, Perl, and other modern languages. Users can also edit the file in a remote place. It provides an option for Clipboard facility (cut/copy/paste)
How to Install in Ubuntu via PPA
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mc3man/older sudo apt update sudo apt install gedit gedit-plugins gedit-common
Conclusion
As a software developer, sometimes you need to edit a file on your server that is too complicated to open from your local editor. It could be that the file is huge and needs a lot of memory to open it. Maybe it’s a file generated by another program, and you can’t debug it on your computer. Luckily, there are a lot of command line text editors for Linux that can help you out in these situations.