Text editor

	Platforms	Pros	Cons
Atom	Cross	built-in markdown file preview
Bluefish	Cross	remote file, project support	crash when I try Print->Preview
Brackets	Cross	good for web designer
Emacs	Cross	split the buffers
Gedit	Cross	print preview (incorrect when landscape but pdf is right)	no code folding
Geany	Cross	print preview; Terminal; split window
IntelliJ IDEA	Cross
Notepad++	Win	print line numbers, Right-click menu	R syntax highlight not work with most themes
Qt Creator	Cross	split a window (even same file)
RStudio	Cross	folding, best IDE for R coding	not support drag and drop a file but SendTo works
Sublime	Cross
vi	Cross
Visual Studio Code	Cross	Integrated Terminal, Markdown preview	Should not include minimap function

HTML editors: see here.

Atom

• Markdown preview feature is OK but it cannot export to pdf or HTML.
• pandoc conversion to html/PDF is not good; scripts part has no rectangle, tables have no separate lines.

Packages

To install a new package, go to Preferences -> Install -> type the package name and hit ENTER.

To remove a package, just delete the related folder.

rm -rf ~/.atom/packages/markdown-toc

• Markdown Preview Enhanced. It allows to view in browser (html) or export to PDF. Use r instead of R for R language syntax highlight. Another nice feature is the scrollings of the markdown file and preview are together.
• Markdown TOC. It messes up the # sign in script blocks :( So I switch to RStudio which has a good support to create the TOC (YAML header).

Emacs

• Install on Ubuntu. sudo apt install emacs
• Keyboard shortcuts
  • Save file: ctrl + x, ctrl + s
  • Quit: ctrl + x, ctrl + c
  • Forward search/backward search: ctrl + s, ctrl + r
• Disabling Backup and Auto-save in Emacs and Change theme

$ cat ~/.emacs
;disable backup
(setq backup-inhibited t)
;disable auto save
(setq auto-save-default nil)
(load-theme 'manoj-dark)

Gedit

• To create a new tab, Ctrl + t.
• Preferences
  • View: display line numbers, highlight current line
  • Font and colors: change to font size 14, color scheme = Cobalt
  • Plugins: External Tools
• To split a screen, Do "Documents -> New Tab Group. No extra plugin is needed to download. I am using version 3.10.4 from Ubuntu 14.04.
• Restore tabs plugin. It works on my gedit 3.4 (ubuntu 12.04). Follow the instruction there exactly.
• Source code browser plugin. This makes gedit a good IDE for developing C++/Java code since the left panel can show symbols. Click F9 to show the side panel.
• Darkmate theme.

cd /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/styles
sudo gedit darkermate.xml

gedit > Edit > preferences > font and colors > color scheme.

Launch from a command line

gksu gedit XXXX

Plugins

• Gedit has no built-in options to show special characters except through gedit-plugins (sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins). See Draw Spaces.
• How do I open a Terminal window in gEdit?
  1. sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins
  2. Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins -> Embedded terminal
  3. View -> Bottom panel

Geany

Geany can be used to run a bash script file line by line. See Debugging_Scripts.

Display special characters

Geany has a way to show special characters (Tabs/LF/CR). Edit > Preferences > Display > Tick, Show whitespace (tabs) & Show Line endings(CR/LF).

For DOS text file, the line ending is CR+LF.

For Unix text file, the line ending is LF.

Font size

Users can use either one of the following methods

1. Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Fonts to adjust the font size.
2. Keyboard bindings: Ctrl + Shift + '+' to increase the font size or Ctrl + '-' to decrease the font size. This does not affect the font size in Preferences.

Printing

The font size in Preferences affects the printing. The font size changed by using the keyboard bindings does not affect printing.

Remove vertical line

Edit -> Preferences -> Editor -> Display -> Uncheck Long line marker.

Visual Studio Code

10 Essential Productivity Tips for Visual Studio Code

Sublime

Install it from the Snap Store on Linux

My settings file which takes care of the scheme, font size and word wrap.

{
	"color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Monokai.sublime-color-scheme",
	"font_size": 16,
	"open_files_in_new_window": false,
	"word_wrap": true,
	"theme": "Default.sublime-theme"
}

Theme

Write or Code Faster in Your Linux Text Editor With Custom Themes

Text editor with navigation

7 Best Note-Taking Tools for Programmers

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-note-taking-tools-programmers/

RStudio

Code -> Insert Section

We can create different levels of sections.

Netbeans and navigator

On ODroid (ARM works too!) Ubuntu 16.04

# Note: OpenJDK 8 will not work
# We have to install Oracle Java
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

sudo apt-get install netbeans # version 8.1 in my case

See screenshots

• Markdown support
• HTML support

Note:

• Netbeans has a built-in support for HTML/XML files. XML has an advantage over HTML since HTML cannot have any tags you want.
• We need to download a plugin for markdown file support. Go to Tools -> Plugins. In the 'Settings' tab make sure the 3 items are checked. Go to 'Available plugins' tab

search 'markdown'. Install 'Markdown support'. It works on Netbeans 8.0 on x64 Ubuntu 14.04 and Netbeans 8.1 on my ARM Ubuntu 16.04.

• For Markdown or XML, the comment syntax can be found here.
• For some reason, the order of headlines on the navigator pane is not the same as they appeared on the file. So it is better to use XML file format.
• My hack on Netbeans options (change to use a dark color on background).
  • Profile: NetBeans
  • Syntax. Default: Foreground=White, Background=Dark Gray. Comment: Foreground=cyan. Keyword: Foreground=Orange.
  • Highlighting. Highlight Caret Row: Foreground=Dark Gray. Background=Pink.
• For choosing colors, go to Google: rgb to hex
• For some reason, it makes my graphical Mint desktop unstable. I have to use Ctrl + Alt + F1 and Ctrl + Alt + F8 to fix it temporarily. Deal breaker!

IntelliJ IDEA

It requires JDK. The community version is free. Download the tarball. Extract it and run bin/idea.sh. It even identifies a mismatch in my XML documentation that netbeans does not find.

• Viewing Structure of a Source File or Alt + 7
• Open a terminal at the bottom; Alt + F12
• SOLARIZED color. Copy icls file to ~/.IdeaIC2016.2/config/colors directory. Restart Intellij IDEA. Go to File -> Settings -> Editor -> Colors & Fonts -> Font.
• To deactivate spelling checking: Ctrl + Alt + s -> Editor -> Inspections -> Spelling -> Typo. Uncheck it.
• We need to create a project for IntelliJ IDEA to automatically open the file we are working on. IDEA will create a hidden folder call .idea. For git repository, we shall create the .gitignore file contains

.idea/workspace.xml
.idea/misc.xml

Zim

• Available in Linux, Windows & Mac.
• The side panel contains a hierarchical view of the pages.
• Right click on the page tab, we can create a new page or sub page.
• On Ubuntu, the title bar is on the top of the desktop.
• Auto save. Auto re-open the last session.
• Handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors.
• Toggle notebook editable.
• Insert image (cannot resize)
• Plugins, e.g. Equation editor, R plot,
• The default folder for storing the notes is ~/Notebook. Each page has its own file in storage.

~/Notebooks/Notes/
~/Notebooks/Notes/notebook.zim
~/Notebooks/Notes/Home.txt

If we create a 2nd page called 'Home2' with sub pages 'Subpage1' and 'subpage2' we will have

~/Notebooks/Notes/Home2.txt
~/Notebooks/Notes/Home2
~/Notebooks/Notes/Home2/subpage1.txt
~/Notebooks/Notes/Home2/subpage2.txt

• Getting Work Done in Zim

Cherrytree - a hierarchical note taking application

featuring rich text and syntax highlighting, storing data in a single xml or sqlite file.

Vim

with the Tagbar plugin.

The instruction works for cpp file.

Unfortunately xml files are not supported from my testing. See its wiki for supported filetypes.

Lime

Maybe