Haiku n00b: What are my text editing options?

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Hello guys, my first post here. It’s very prosaic.

I’m planning a move from Debian Linux to Haiku. This is one of two major moves as I split my existing computer resource: I’m moving all the media production onto a new Windows PC and installing Haiku onto my netbook.

Haiku will be running a browser and LibreOffice, neither of which I will have to think about much. But I presently spend a lot of time editing text files in FeatherPad, a tiny text editor with a stripped-back, writing-centred interface (rather than a mass of syntax highlighting for coders).

I’m guessing that Haiku will have more than one text editor available and if anyone can recommend a FeatherPad equivalent (or even a port) I’d appreciate a steer.

Best, NP.

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StyledEdit is the preinstalled text editor and should fit your needs pretty good.
It’s made for documents,not code,so it provides some basic formatting options (bold,italics,underlined,…) but no syntax highlighting.

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Open a Terminal and type pkgman install featherpad

There will be a bunch of dependencies to be installed as well, but pkgman will take care of that for you.

Oh, and BTW, welcome.

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Interesting fact as Haiku logos have been often mistaken for feathers, we don’t have Leafpad yet. It would perhaps make more sense. :grin:

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Haiku also comes with the pre-installed Pe editor (and more), support syntax-highlighting for multiple languages (C++/bash/etc).

Other then that are multiple Texteditors, in Terminal type: pkgman search “text editor”

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After going back and forth a few times, I now stick to Koder for a programmer’s editor. Others I’ve tried include CudaText and GVim. My favorite from Linux is Geany, and it’s also available.

If you need a minimal editor for writing rather than programming (I thought FeatherPad was for programmers too), I made one, but it’s not in HaikuDepot. Shameless plug: try ToyEd.

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Hi @niftyprose, and welcome!

All applications recommended above are good options for what you want. But if you are somewhat familiar with Emacs (or basic ed usage) you might want to give Emacs’ Muse mode a try. It sounds like pretty much exactly what you are looking for.
You don’t have to be an Emacs expert to use it, knowing just the basic ed commands should suffice - and you probably know at least a few of them already, as they are basically everywhere in GNU/Linux. Haiku Terminal supports most of them as well. But if you are familiar with modal editing (Vim-style) using Muse on Emacs together with Evil mode should work as well, but I never tried that.

Installation of Muse is a one-liner via Emacs repositories (which work perfectly in Haiku). There are also other Emacs-based lightweight options, such as Emacs for writers. More “sophisticated” options do exist as well, including the built-in beast called Org mode - but that seems to be overkill for what you want.

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I suspect it requires LXDE libraries. Let me check it out.

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Honestly, it was more for the joke than anything else. It is very basic and doesn’t seem to bring interesting features that makes it worthy.

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Thanks, guys, those are all great suggestions. I guess I’ll try installing FeatherPad in the first instance. (As you might have guessed, I’m still kind of hazy about which favourite Linux packages can follow me onto Haiku, and there are bound to be a few utilities that I wasn’t aware of needing – so FeatherPad is good practice.) I’m maybe three weeks away from doing this work and will update this thread when I get to it. Best, NP.

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Hello and welcome. Not sure if you are using 32 or 64 bits, but on 64 bit version, there is a list of text exitors:

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checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes

checking for GTK... configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-2.0) were not met:

Package 'gtk+-2.0', required by 'virtual:world', not found

That’s old-school! Converting it to GTK3 or even GTK4 should be possible, but a lot of work for very little payoff.

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Its successor Mousepad is based on Gtk3 if it helps, and it has more features, like syntax highlighting.

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~/Desktop/Unzip/mousepad-master> ./autogen.sh
autogen.sh: You don’t seem to have the Xfce development tools installed on
your system, which are required to build this software.
Please install the xfce4-dev-tools package first, it is available
from your distribution or ``https://www.xfce.org/.

Bugger this, we have enough text editors :grinning_face:

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Checked up earlier there, when I saw their “real” last usefull commit on their home page was 6 years ago I didn’t even bother. :rofl:

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Don’t be shy to ask. Nobody here is going to tell you to RTFM.

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+1 for mousepad, I use it on Devuan Linux…. I prefer it to featherpad, which is used on MX Linux.

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It depends what features exactly you need in your text editor.

Personally, I’d first try Haiku’s StyledEdit. It comes with Haiku, has no dependencies and launches instantly (file size ~200 KiB).

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StyledEdit is definitely the first thing one to try.
Koder would be my second choice. Even if it’s a code editor, it isn’t overloaded. It is quite pleasant to use and has a toolbar that you may find handy.

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Genio is another alternative. You don’t have to use its IDE features, disable all the side bars etc, you don’t need. The “project” approach may still be handy: drag’n’drop a folder with your text files and have them in the Projects side bar to quickly open via double-click. That way you also get a search over all files in that folder.