The article lists our best 6 Linux text editors. The list includes Vi, Nano, Atom, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code & Emacs.

A text editor is an application that allows you to read, open and modify a text files. It can be used for tasks as small as taking notes and as important as development. At present, a text editor is not just limited to editing plain text but incorporates additional features like syntax highlighting, split screens for comparisons and various plugins for other things.

Most of the Linux distributions comes preinstalled with Vi & Nano editor. Vi(m) has its own user base but may seem complicated for a new user. On other hand, a graphical text editor like Visual Studio Code do not require any commands. All of them has it’s own user base fulfilling their needs.

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In this article, we are covering 6 best Linux text editors.

Vi – Linux text editor

Vi is one of the oldest (dates back to 1976) text editor for Linux and Unix systems. It comes as preinstalled in most of the *nix OSs, is quicker than any other text editor once you learn the basics and lets you record macros for repetitive tasks.

Vi - Linux text editors

It’s a modal text editor with two modes – insert and command. Pressing ‘i’ shifts you the insert mode where you can edit text and ‘Escape’ brings back to the command mode where you can do common tasks like saving, saving and exiting or exiting without saving the modification to a file.

It may require an initial learning to utilize the complete Vi capabilities.

Emacs

The GNU Emacs text editor is an open source, customizable and self documenting real time display editor.

Emacs - Linux text editors

Features

  • GNU Emacs can be customized using Emacs Lisp code or using the GUI.
  • Supports syntax coloring.
  • In-built documentation and tutorials for new users.
  • Unicode support.
  • Supports downloading and installing extensions.
  • In addition to text editing, it includes a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger and more.

The latest release for Emacs is Emacs 26.3 released in August 2019. It’s available for Windows, GNU / Linux, BSDs and Mac and can be downloaded from below link.

https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/emacs/download.html

Alternatively, you can install using terminal.

sudo apt-get install emacs

Atom editor for Linux

Atom is a another free and open source text editor for Linux. It’s developed by the GitHub team and licensed under MIT license.

Atom text editor for linux

It runs on Electron, a framework used for developing a cross platform applications using web technologies – HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Node.js.

Features

  • Atom supports cross platform editiong and is available for all the major operating systems.
  • It comes with smart auto-complete.
  • Support for multiple panes to compare files, and edit code across multiple files.
  • Tons of packages are available to add new features and functionalities to Atom.
  • Highly customizable and comes with 8 different themes.

You can grab the latest copy of Atom editor from its github download section.

https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.47.0

Or, use terminal to install atom.

sudo snap install atom --classic

GNU Nano

Developed initially as a free and open source alternative to Pico text editor, Nano editor became part of GNU project in 2001.

GNU Nano

Nano is a keyboard oriented editor with a shortcut bar placed at the bottom of screen listing shortcuts for commonly used commands. It includes some of the basic features like syntax highlighting, regular expression search and replace, line by line editing and line numbers.

You can download Nano from its official site

https://www.nano-editor.org/download.php

Visual Studio Code – Linux text editors

Visual Studio Code is a free and open source code editor by Microsoft. It’s highly favored by developers due to its in built git commands and support for autocomplete among other features.

Visual Studio Code

Features

  • Visual Studio Code comes in built with Git commands.
  • It includes a syntax highlighting and autocomplete feature with the name of IntelliSense.
  • It supports debugging, break points can be added.
  • A list of extensions are available to add new languages, themes, debuggers etc.

The latest version is Visual Studio Code v1.45 and the application receives monthly updates.

Visual Studio Code is available in the Snap store. A deb and rpm package is available and for other systems, there’s a .tar.gz 64 bit available to download use. You can also download it from the Ubuntu Software.

https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads

Notepad++

Probably everyone has used Notepad++ at some point of time. It’s an awesome text editor written in C++ and released with GPL license.

Notepad++ in Linux

Notepad++ is not natively released for Linux. However, it is available as a Snap which uses an embedded version of Wine.

Features

  • Notepad++ supports syntax highlighting, code folding and autocomplete.
  • It supports Macros and has autosave feature on closing the editor.
  • Supports regular expressions for finding and replacing strings.
  • It also support split screen, file comparison and has lots of plugin for different tasks.

You can get the snap from below link

https://snapcraft.io/notepad-plus-plus

Notepad++ snap can be installed using below command too. 

sudo snap install notepadqq

Wrapping Up

I could only come up with these 6 free and open source Linux text editors. Which one is your favorite among these? Let us know in the comments.

If you have any other suggestions to add in this list of Linux text editors, feel free to suggest!