FOSSPicks

Textadept

Not many other software categories offer such breadth of choice as text editors. Of course, the old stalwarts are still causing trouble and discussion, but there's also a constant supply of new pretenders, each attempting a different take on entering one letter at a time. Textadept, like Min and micro, is aiming for the minimalist dollar, promising speed and distraction-free design without sacrificing essential features. Thankfully, it does have a different emphasis from Min, in an attempt to be an editor for programmers. It doesn't support quite as many languages, with around 100 languages currently supported for syntax highlighting purposes, but such large numbers don't really mean much when 90 percent of programming is done with just a handful of languages. And you can do more with those languages in Textadept than you can with Min.

Textadept is certainly mature. It's now 10 years old, with a release every two months for more than six years. It can be run either as a curses binary within the command line or as an application within its own window. The executable is around 5MB and can be run off a USB stick, with a promise to consume a mere 15MB of RAM. Into this tiny space, it's not only capable of cramming in the lighting fast syntax highlighting but, more importantly, code completion, too. For those of us without photographic memories, or perhaps getting on a little, from the time when source code was printed in yellow pages within magazines, this feature is essential. Autocompletion works with symbols within the files you're editing, as well as symbols for the language you're working with, complete with links to the API documentation. It's also almost entirely keyboard driven, completely themable, and well documented.

Project Website

https://foicica.com/textadept/

How many editors take less than 15MB and can have variable font sizes in unlimited horizontal and vertical split views?

Email client

Geary 0.12

Offline email clients are still important and should remain important, despite many of us using web-based email clients for our day-to-day email needs. They're essential if you want to back up your email, for example, which is something you should be doing, but they're also useful productivity tools, keeping you away from the temptation of a browser or constant updates. The problem is that the popularity of web-based email clients has come at the cost of desktop clients, with most popular Linux clients going the same way as the awesome Eudora. Geary, after spending months in what felt like suspended animation, is proving the exception with this update, released almost 18 months after version 0.11. It is now part of the Gnome project, which is exactly where a project as good as Geary deserves to be.

The best thing about Geary is that it uses Vala/Gtk+, showing the best of Gnome's capabilities. Its slick design is better than the equivalent web client and will display more information, more efficiently. The transitions, for example, are wonderful, and the way the top bar is used as a toolbar and menu holder keeps everything looking clean, even on a KDE desktop with an entirely different window manager. Like Gmail, which you can integrate seamlessly, clever keywords can be used to group and search your inbox, and conversations are grouped vertically, making Geary one of the only offline Linux email applications to do this well. This new update adds lots of much needed stability and improves rich text message composition considerably. The best feature, though, is that you can now press Ctrl+? (Shift+/) to see a crib sheet of shortcuts for whichever mode you're in, helping you learn your way around the application effortlessly.

Project Website

https://github.com/GNOME/geary

Geary eases the transition from web email by looking slick and cleverly grouping conversations.

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