List of light GUI text editors

[Member PPC]

https://www.debugpoint.com/lightweight-notepad-linux/

This article lists T.E. by Ram usage:

mousepad 303 KB
featherpad 1.7 MB
leafpad 7.7 MB
beaver pad 11.1 MB
gedit 30.2 MB

I’m currently checking out mousepad – it’s deb package is less than 200kb and it uses 1599 kB of disk space. It installed no dependencies on my system. It’s fast and very well localized (at least in in pt-pt).

Edit – I corrected the title of this thread, as recommended (and considering anticapitalista’s findings).

P.

• This topic was modified 5 months ago by PPC.
• This topic was modified 5 months ago by PPC.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@PPC: users have the freedom to install whatever they want, as long as they are capable of installing and maintaining whatever they choose.

303 KB isn’t bad for a graphical notepad editor. Those who can handle vi-style editors can get a truly minimal vi alternative called levee, but it won’t give you any hints to speak of, you MUST know what you’re doing if you go that way. Last time I installed and tested a bunch of editors levee was #1 in minimal resource usage – even lighter than the very minimal ‘ed’ that was the original UNIX editor; that really surprised me.

When I use a desktop environment I usually use Xfce, and mousepad is the default Xfce editor.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator BobC]

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If we were to add it, it might make a good space saving default editor replacement for both geany and leafpad in base.

I’ve used it also.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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I just checked mousepad RAM usage on antiX-22 and it is double that of leafpad.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Moderator BobC]

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Tilde is a nice multi-file, console based programming editor with horizontal or vertical split window ability worth considering. It uses the same copy/paste keys as Firefox and other web browsers, and can paste from them, and can do automatic backups as well. It uses half as much memory as Leafpad and the download is 135k but has some dependencies. Its in the repos already.

[Member andyprough]

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I fell in love with geany because of antiX. It uses 10mb more ram than leafpad, but geany does everything so perfectly out of the box for me, it’s worth the small ram tax.

[Member olsztyn]

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andyprough wrote:

I fell in love with geany because of antiX. It uses 10mb more ram than leafpad, but geany does everything so perfectly out of the box for me, it’s worth the small ram tax.

I concur with this opinion. Geany has format programmers of old times (I mean myself, by no means referring to young age of @andyprough) do appreciate.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator BobC]

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On most of my machines I use geany, too, but when that CD file size limit comes up for base in 23, something will need to be trimmed to make room for upstream code growth.

[Member PPC]

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I use geany by default, but after a recent post on another thread, I noticed that if you click a .txt file in zzzfm, it does open in leafpad and that got me curious.
I recently tested mousepad in antiX 22 and both the deb package and disk space it used after install, where much higher than in antiX 19…
I tested bothe mousepad and leafpad back to back in this system that has both installed – it’s a single core netbook. Leafpad did start a bit faster AND used much less memory…

I ran ps_mem.py to compare RAM usage:

4.8 MiB + 5.3 MiB = 10.1 MiB leafpad
12.2 MiB + 604.5 KiB = 12.8 MiB geany
19.4 MiB + 6.2 MiB = 25.6 MiB mousepad

Wow. Leafpad won closely followed by geany (That’s not strickly a Text Editor, but I use it as such all the time, like most people, I guess)

I can only assume one of two things:
1- the person that wrote the article I linked to simply lied about the results
2- leafpad may use some libraries that XFCE keeps in RAM, or it’s partly resident in RAM itself, in XFCE, so that’s why the person reported this insanely low RAM usage

I should have checked more carefully, before posting, but I was in hollyday mode, doing stuff in slow motion. Anyway, I found out some new open source projects… I always keep paying close attention to stuff that uses the least system resources possible and it’s easy to use. I guess the Dev team did do all that work, before me, and did it much better… 🙁
Anyway, sometimes we strike gold… I’ll try to do my “homework” better, before making this kind of suggestions in the future, anticapitalista…

Edit: for me, a secondary Text Editor ideally should have autosave feature- saving each character as I type. I only ran into this feature once, on a notepadqq, a notapd++ look alike for Linux (but it had some localization problems- it assumed pt-pt was the same as fr?).

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by PPC.

[Member sybok]

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Hi, @PPC do you think it reasonable to edit the name of the topic to “List of light GUI text editors”?
I got the impression this is the (core of this) topic discussed and a proposal/recommendation from this class of editors is intended as an output.

If I am mistaken, my first choice would be ‘vim’ (mentioned also by @Brian Masinick) which is pretty hard to get accustomed to for a novice.

[Member oops]

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… For fun, tried with ps_mem.py too to compare RAM usage (with a same small text.txt file):

261.1 MiB + 238.5 MiB = 499.7 MiB jEdit – java (usefull for some tasks, gedcom files)
237.9 MiB + 171.3 MiB = 409.2 MiB soffice.bin (LibreOffice 7.4.3.2 Writer)
27.7 MiB + 78.9 MiB = 106.5 MiB meld (2) (to compare 2 files)
44.7 MiB + 56.3 MiB = 101.0 MiB focuswriter
21.4 MiB + 32.3 MiB = 53.7 MiB featherpad (my prefered)
21.6 MiB + 23.6 MiB = 45.2 MiB geany (usefull for some tasks)
15.5 MiB + 20.0 MiB = 35.4 MiB pluma
12.6 MiB + 17.3 MiB = 29.9 MiB mousepad
5.4 MiB + 8.1 MiB = 13.6 MiB leafpad (light)
5.8 MiB + 3.5 MiB = 9.3 MiB xfwrite (the lighter here)

—
1.3 MiB + 946.0 KiB = 2.2 MiB nano
500.0 KiB + 249.0 KiB = 749.0 KiB visudo
Vim not tested

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by oops.
• This reply was modified 5 months ago by oops.
• This reply was modified 5 months ago by oops.

[Member PPC]

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oops wrote:

5.8 MiB + 3.5 MiB = 9.3 MiB xfwrite (the lighter here)

Where did you install xfwrite from? I can’t find it’s package anywhere, not even using the omniscient Google. Is it part of the xfe package? Or does it have it’s own package?

And I tested Tilde (available in the repo)- it’s a very nice CLI GUI text editor – it works fine both using the keyboard only or the mouse- it has the look and feel of a modern GUI app, but running inside a terminal window! It looks much better without colors (the default background hurts my eyes). Unfortunately, like most CLI apps, it seems not to be localized (not at least in pt-pt, I haven’t checked the .deb package for other languages). If wordgrinder had a GUI like Tilde, it would be an almost perfect word processor (wordgrinder is a Word Processor, not a mere Text Editor, and it’s available in the repository. It has it’s own file extension, but you can import/export .txt and .odt files and do basic text formatting, like bold, underline and italic- NB “italic fonts” do not render in roxterm, but appear fine in urxvt terminal)

P.

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by PPC.

[Member oops]

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… From MX repos, package xfe.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Just for the fun of it, I installed a bunch of text editors on siduction where I happen to be at the moment. They are not all GUI-based editors; a few of them aren’t even full screen editors, but I checked them out.

Sure enough, they still consume resources in essentially the order I remember: of the “recent” ones, Featherpad is one of the least memory efficient, but it has supported code. On siduction, leafpad isn’t even available unless I grab it and build it from somewhere else. Levee is the smallest editor in size yet it is a reasonable vi replacement. Ed, the original UNIX editor, is a line editor, is quick, surprisingly powerful, but you must know ed/sed editing commands to take advantage of it. It’s less efficient than levee though.

Geany is right in the middle of the pack in terms of memory usage; that is very impressive considering that Geany is a legitimate, light integrated development environment (IDE).

My old development favorite, GNU Emacs, uses nearly double the resources that Geany uses, but on modern systems it starts up immediately and is very responsive.

The other classic favorite, vi/vim/gvim in full screen form uses only twice the virtual memory used by ed, so that’s pretty impressive, and it’s very fast.
Gvim, the graphical version of vim, uses about double the resources of vim, but is just as quick to invoke and use as the others.

On a reasonably capable system, any of these editors performs well, so it’s a matter of choice, convenience and preference; all are great alternatives.

--
Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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oops wrote:

… From MX repos, package xfe.

If I am not mistaken XFE does not have print capability. At least not working in my instance…
Mem use very small though.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

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