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Please help me find an editor that behaves more like the modern Windows editors do, that I could use on a NetBSD box through PuTTY.

This includes the absense of the distinction between view/insert/append modes, basic shortcuts such as Ctrl+Left/Right to jump a word at a time, and other niceties such as perhaps Home/End and PageUp/Down moving the cursor around (in my vi they just ding).

I can live without macros because I only ever tweak an occasional setting this way, and nothing else.

pico is pretty close, but I was wondering if there are other editors that might fit this bill?

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Have you tried easyedit? – MrStatic Jan 11 '10 at 18:46
You can try to use editor created for X11 environment (for example gEdit) with ssh X11 forwarding. – Maciek Sawicki Jan 11 '10 at 18:52
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vi has never supported such "niceties" as cursor keys. Those were added in vim. (When vi was written, terminals didn't have dedicated cursor keys.) – grawity Jan 11 '10 at 19:12
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grawity is so true, vi and vim is not the same thing. Even thou you can make vim behave as vi... – Johan Jan 11 '10 at 21:02
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Agreed, but to some people (incl myself) it's shocking that programs written in the days before cursor keys still survive almost unchanged AND are even made default editors in modern OS releases. – romkyns Jan 12 '10 at 9:57
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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

dit. From a review:

I can’t contain my glee. Here are the totally groundbreaking features, never before seen all together in one editor.

  • The ability to page up and down. Revolutionary!
  • Control-left and control-right to hop words. Amazing!
  • Control-s to save, control-q to quit. Incredible!
  • Control-c to copy, control-x to cut, control-v to paste. Astounding!

There’s no sarcasm there at all either. A usable text editor.

(The author goes on in that post to say "In other news, I decided to implement a DOS editor wrapper using DOSBox.", which shows you where he's coming from, and is sort of awesome.)

I tend to use joe, though, because I've found it often pre-installed on otherwise-unfamiliar systems, and you can get it on Cygwin. It's not like edit.com, but its little help panel (^KH) makes up for almost all unfamiliarity.

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up vote 2 down vote

Nano is my editor of choice, as soon as I learned some of the keys (Ctrl+x for close, ctrl+w for find, etc.).

If you have enough bandwidth, X11 forwarding with your editor of choice is a good option. I do this a bit from the windows machine at my work with Xming and PuTTY. Great programs, IMO.

Good luck!

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Nano is a more modern version of Pico – Iain Jan 11 '10 at 21:58
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up vote 0 down vote

Also found diakonos which seems to be a little more finished than dit.

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