Diakonos: A Programmer's Text Editor in Ruby

A text editor (or for some an IDE) is the most important tool a programmer has, other than the programming language itself. Religious wars over editors are inevitable because people spend so much time with their editor. Some people flip-flop, but many people become both functionally and emotionally attached. No one wants to spend time learning new keybindings when they could be programming instead.

Personally, I use nano. This is not out of ignorance, mental damage, or a deep moral perversion as my friends that use emacs and vi insist. I want an editor which is small and quick to install. It must be available on all platforms and easy to install (if there's no Debian/Ubuntu package in the main repositories, forget it). I'm not going to mess around with configuring it. And I basically just don't like vi. So nano has been winning the war for my soul for many years. However, like all programmers, I dream of a better world. I wouldn't mind a slightly (or even somewhat) better editor, but I everything I've ever tried lacked the beautiful simplicity of nano. With more features comes more hassle.

Then I found Diakonos. It's a console-based text editor (which I like because I ssh into my server and edit things as much as I edit them locally), and it's written in Ruby. It has the modern features, such as multiple buffers, syntax highlighting, and syntax-aware indentation. It's scriptable, either through the Ruby interface or through external programs (in any language) which are fed the old buffer on stdin and output new buffer contents on stdout.

Like all editors under my consideration, it has packages in the main repositories of both Debian and Ubuntu. It also has Windows and OS X binaries (also a Ruby gem for you Ruby guys). It's as quick and easy to install as nano, and through it has lots more features, they are not obtrusive. The keybindings are the "standard" Windows-style ones (ctrl-x cut, ctrl-c copy, ctrl-v paste). You can of course configure it to emacs or whatever style you want, but I am personally happy to use a similar set of keys across my editor and web browser.

I am particularly excited about finally having an editor that's not written in C. This is a personal issue. Many people like C, but I just think it's time for us to move on as a society. I have a T-shirt that says "I would code in C for love, but not for money." While you may love C, autoconf, and make, I am personally very excited about an editor both written in and scriptable in Ruby. It seems like a step towards the future. It's also nice to have a fresh codebase which doesn't inherit several decades of design decisions.

My apologies for insulting your favorite text editors and programming languages, my Internet friends. I meant no harm. Just check out Diakonos for a bit and see what you think. It has a feel which is both fresh and yet somehow also classic. A "modern classic" if you will. And it's fun. In a way I can't really articulate, it's just enjoyable to use. Also, the author is a really nice guy and the IRC channel isn't full of obnoxious jerks (#mathetes on freenode), just good folks like you and me, hacking on code. I'll see you there!