TinyEditor Discussion

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Tiny Editor Discussion

I'd like to see a list identifying the tiny editors which are used as the default rescue editors by each Posix (each Linux distribution, each FooBSD?, etc); this can be useful when writing troubleshoot documentation that wants to agnostic about the Posix it's running on. Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu all use nano now; Debian used to use ae; I don't know about Red Hat or SuSE?.

The best list I've seen for DOS is: http://reimagery.com/fsfd/index.htm

The "short.stop" web site does a feature comparison of 9 editors. The top 5 editors are (after compression) all of 4 kilobytes in size.

Another list for DOS, Windows and Unix is here: Twee Editors

The idea here is that there are sometimes needs for very small text editors that can fit onto tiny (which is a subjective term for certain!) media. For example a small text editor to fit on a 170k Commodore C64 floppy!

IBM OS/2 used to have a copy of the E editor on its boot floppies. Linux does the same.

What Tiny Editors do you know of?

TinyEditors were popular in the days when microcomputers were not powerful enough to run GnuEmacs (which makes heavy use of its internal Lisp interpreter). They often emulated popular KeyboardLayouts with a less powerful (or no) MacroLanguage. These days, most PCs are powerful enough to run any editor you want, so this is less of an issue.

People who spend a lot of time using word processors often use TinyEditors when they need to edit configuration files, shell scripts, or email, all of which must be plain ASCII (see Pico). Most Linux distributions include one or more simple GUI editors for this purpose, although they often have JOE, Nano, or Pico as well.

Programmers edit in plain ASCII all day long, and tend to denigrate TinyEditors (see EasyVsPowerful).

Terry Loveall has a page about "Twee Editors", text editors that are no bigger than they need to be: http://www.modest-proposals.com/Twee.htm. They range from 3K to 32K in size, for DOS, Windows and Unix.

The Twee editors included TED, the 3K DOS editor whose assembly source was published in PC Magazine in the '80s. Many people (myself included) wrote extended versions of TED to add missing functionality, such as search.

The original version of TurboPascal (up until version 3.0) was something on the order of 32k (yes, K not Mbytes) in size and included the compiler AND a WordStar compatible text editor.

(When Phillipe Kahn was getting ready to release Turbo Pascal, one question was how the editor should behave. He surveyed his staff about their preferred editors. Everyone listed a different first choice, but everyone listed WordStar as the second choice. Kahn decided that WordStar was the most familiar to the intended market, and used a superset of WordStar key mapping in TurboPascal. -DMcCunney)

SmallFootprint

David Cary: Joe and SetEdit are tiny editors? If so, I probably have about a dozen more candidates installed on my machine. What's your maximum size that still counts as tiny? Mine is about 50K, depending. --DMcCunney