Discovering Scribes – A Lightweight Linux Text Editor

• linux

I’m currently on a quest for a desktop environment that is lean enough to run on my MSI Wind netbook, but scales up nicely to a multi-monitor desktop environment. Now I’ve sucessfully installed Ubuntu on the netbook but haven’t really taken the next step on getting it running the various programming environments I’m used to working with. Currently I’m stuck in a world of a heavyweight IDE (eclipse) that really doesn’t scale well to the small screen of the netbook.

In terms of lightweight text editors, I’ve investigated a few and been reasonably comfortable with options including jEdit (cross-platform), Notepad++ (windows), GEdit (linux – gnome) and jed (linux – console). So configuring up a linux environment gives me some options, but none that I’m completely happy with. I really want to find the text editor on linux that people feel as passionate about as they do about textmate on Mac.

From looking around, there really is nothing that compares to textmate’s editing and coding experience on the Mac, but I like Scribes style. Its author has clear vision end executes on that vision nicely:

“Think of Scribes as the little rebellious editor that scuffs at, rebuffs and mocks other editors for their needless complexity and vanity.”

Scribes really does focus on just doing text editing for programmers well. For good reason scribes doesn’t offer tabbed window support and points in the direction of our operating systems window manager for this. This alone impresses me – it challenges some of the new design paradigms we as software developers are needing to follow. It’s nice to see someone questioning why and going against the flow – I would much rather see effort spent on making a great text editor rather than splitting the time across multiple areas. I mean a great text editor is what I’m chasing.

So far, the program looks really good – going to play some more with the templating and auto-replacement capabilities of the editor and all being well I expect it to make it into my list of can’t live without tools.