Pretty text editor for Ubuntu

[Erik Christiansen]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 09:16:42PM +0100, chombee wrote:
> 
> * A light text on dark background theme, to reduce eye-strain. I think
> I've found that the best thing for this is not actually white on black,
> but more like 90% white (a light grey) on 90% black (a dark grey). But
> if anyone can educate me, please do.

For the last several decades, I've used Yellow on DarkSlateGrey for my
xterms and the applications running in them. (On solaris and linux)
e.g.

xterm -fg yellow -bg darkslategrey -cr red -sb -rightbar -geometry 100x50+0+10 &

Black on white gives me a headache in 20 minutes, so I understand your
need. :-)

> * A pretty colour theme for syntax and other highlighting, colours that
> go well together and with the white on black. I don't want to choose
> these colours myself, I am not a designer, I want someone who knows what
> they're doing to make good choices that I can use.

Try a visit to vim.org. Though I don't use syntax highlighting, vim has
this for numerous languages. (Once learnt, vim increases productivity
very significantly. The vim mailing list may also be useful, once the
doco has been read.)

> * And also a nice looking monospace font. Out of Ubuntu's default fonts,
> I find that 'monospace' and 'bitstream vera sans mono' are okay. If
> anyone knows anything better I'd like to hear.

The font is usually set in the xterm. The editor cares as little as I do
about that. ;-)

> With GEdit you can change the colours of things, but you have to set
> every colour, including every single syntax highlight colour for every
> language, yourself.

You can edit a vim syntax file, or make your own, if dissatisfied with
the standard one for each language.

> GNOME's terminal seems a bit better than GNOME's text editors: you can
> actually select themes. 

The above is running in a modified "Clearlooks" theme, but that has zero
impact on the foreground and background colours I've mandated.

I'm composing this reply in vim, within mutt, and it all follows the
xterm settings, as do the other 3 xterms currently up, with code edits
or commandline sessions in them.

hth,
Erik

-- 
Unix is the IDE.