Tilde, though, is modern, has few dependencies, and it's in the repos of recent releases of openSUSE and Debian-family distros.
You may never have heard of CUA, but you know how to use it. GNOME 3 threw a lot of this out of the window, but even now most Linux graphical desktop and apps broadly follow the system: a menu bar, with File and usually Edit menus, a Help menu at the end, Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+O to open, and so on. Windows and OS/2 both followed CUA, as did Motif on UNIX, and for a few decades harmony mostly reigned. IBM followed suit with its CUA standard and gradually PC apps fell in line. All its apps looked and worked much the same, because in 1987, Apple published a big, detailed book telling programmers exactly how MacOS UIs should work. WordStar, for instance, offered original WordStar, WordStar 2000 and WordStar Express, all with totally different UIs.īut then the Mac came along. This was partly because they all came from different original platforms, partly because such things weren't standardised yet, and partly because once someone had mastered one company's program, it made them very reluctant to switch to anything else. In the bad old days of WordStar, WordPerfect, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, Arnor Protext and so on, every app had a totally different UI. What if you don't edit code and don't need syntax highlighting and all that jazz? What if you just need to occasionally tweak a config file? But what if you don't edit code and don't need syntax highlighting and all that jazz? What if you just need to occasionally tweak a config file? It has even become a badge of pride to be proficient in some of the really complicated ones. It's worth learning some Byzantine editor because it gives you a big advantage editing code.
Of course, hardcore Linux types don't see this as a problem. Sad to say, but even supporting WordStar (1978) keystrokes counts as modern and friendly in this world.
The problem is that too many of them are weird arcane things from the 1970s, with phenomenal cosmic power, but itty-bitty user interfaces.
One type of software where the world of Unix-like OSes has a positive embarrassment of riches is text editors.