 We have no shortage of really fantastic text editors on Linux We have some really great text editors available to us as Linux users Two of my favorite text editors, of course are Vim and Emacs these days. I'm an Emacs user I have been for a few years now, and I've probably made 40 or 50 videos by now about Emacs and before that as a long-time Vim user I probably made about 40 or 50 videos discussing Vim on this channel So I've made a lot of Vim and Emacs content But not everybody wants to use Vim and Emacs because they're kind of deep topics and they have their own peculiarities Especially because you have to learn a set of key bindings and not everybody wants to have to learn a whole new way of typing Some people just want your standard graphical plain text editor that doesn't involve key chords and key combinations and things like that And I have discussed some of those editors as well. I've done videos about Genie, which is fantastic Doesn't have to use Vim key bindings or anything like that But it is a very nice IDE that comes with a file tree And a mini map and a plugin system and really nice color schemes I've also discussed notepad qq, which is kind of a notepad plus plus clone But it's available to us on Linux where the standard notepad plus plus is Windows only But today I came across a text editor, a plain text editor That just blows all of that out of the water And that text editor is called Light Excel So what is Light Excel? Well, you can see from their website here It's a lightweight, simple, fast, feature field and extremely extensible text editor Written in C and Lua adapted from Light So there was a previous text editor called Light, which I never used Light So they took this really simple editor called Light And I guess they've extended it to now have more features and it's called Light Excel And just from the screenshots here, you can see you've got your little project tree Your tree view on the side, you've got tabs, you've got splits There's a vertical split and a horizontal split And you've also got basically a command prompt Kind of like you would do like a meta X inside Emacs and then launch commands You can do that with Light Excel and it's got a plug-in system If I click on plug-ins, here is a get a page listing all of the plug-ins Let me go ahead and launch Light Excel So let me launch it here on this workspace And you can see when you first launch it, you get Light Excel, the version number And it does give you some key bindings When I say you don't have to learn any key bindings You don't have to learn any key bindings to just edit text, right? It's just your standard plain text editor like Microsoft Windows Notepad, right? But you could do a Control Shift P to run a command So Control Shift P is basically kind of like meta X in Emacs, right? When we can give it a command, for example, you can see one is called New Dock Let's do New Dock and you can see it just opens a new document unsaved Basically an empty file If you want to actually search for a file, you could do Control P It's kind of like your find file command in Emacs So Control P, maybe I want to open my Bash RC And there is the Bash RC It doesn't look like we have any kind of Bash syntax highlighting Well, let's do another file So I'll do Control P Let's go to my .config and tab complete does work while searching And let's search for the futile config .py And you can see syntax highlighting works rather nicely here in Python And you'll notice on the far right hand side, I've got a mini map Now this mini map is not a built-in plug-in for Lite XL What I did just to see how the third party plugins work Let me go back to my web browser here I actually went to the Lite XL website and they have a FAQ Frequently asked questions and they have plug-in recommendations And they have this group of plugins down here One of them is mini map And if you click on it, it just gives you this page with some source code It's a mini map .lua So it's a luafile I just copied this luafile And then in your home directory in .config slash Lite XL slash plugins Put the mini map .lua Just drop the file in there And the next time you run Lite XL, you will have a mini map You have some quick launcher buttons here for opening a new file Saving a file, searching for a file Finding a file essentially Running a command and the settings Now, of course, if you knew key bindings Or you knew the commands to run these With the Ctrl Shift P prompt here You could just type the command But again, we've got quick launchers For some of the more common things that you're going to do Let's click on the settings Because this is interesting The settings is incredible There's a lot of stuff you can actually play here in the settings For when you have the core settings Such as changing some of the user interface You can set up your spacing and tabs And the default line numbers for wrapping things like that There are color schemes For me, I went with one dark Which is essentially one dark, dark one, a doom one That's all the same color scheme This is a color scheme I typically use in my Emacs But you can see you have about, I don't know 25 or 30 different color schemes to choose from Then you have the plugin section If I click on installed here These are all the ones that are already installed There's a couple of them that are turned off Draw white space and trim white space Are turned off by default But you can turn them on If you want, let's fold that back up Some other ones auto reload is turned off You could turn it on if you wanted You can see line wrapping here Line wrapping mode by letters or words I've got the mini map here Now because I added that mini map myself But it knows it's there And here's some of the settings we could play With the mini map that I added And one of the really nice things for a user like me I actually do like key bindings Now, you're not going to get VIM bindings in LightExcel I do think there is a third party plugin That gives you some VIM bindings Like the VIM modes, insert mode, normal mode Things like that But I'm not going to play with that But I do want key bindings for a lot of actions Like I like having that control P for the prompt You're basically finding a file But you have a million key bindings That are already built in here for you to learn If you want to learn them For example, I've got four tabs open I believe you navigate the tabs with the Alt key Plus a number So if I do Alt 1 It'll take me to that first tab The unsaved document there Alt 2 would take me back to the Bash or C Alt 3 back to my Q-tile Alt 4 takes me back to the Settings tab that I was in Now on their website You saw in the screenshots That you do have vertical splits And horizontal splits available to you Those are key bindings And I believe it's Alt Shift And then H-J-K-L Let me try it Alt Shift-L for Right Gives me a right split And from here I can do Control-P To find a file And maybe I've got a Lua file here Which has nice syntax highlighting And if I wanted to do This time a horizontal split I could do Alt Shift and K To split up or down J and K up and down Of course H is left L is right So Alt Shift-H-J-K-L For splitting in whatever direction you want to go in So let me go ahead and close these splits So this is a very quick overview Again a million different things You could play with here In the Settings For Light XL One thing I'll say Is for a plain text editor For a GUI plain text editor I think it is a nice middle ground Because it doesn't force you to learn The Vim bindings Or the Emacs bindings Or the Kacoon bindings You know all those Really extensible, flexible text editors That you really have to spend weeks If not months Learning, getting used to their way of doing things This is very much a genetic kind of text editor Right? It's just got a little bit more going on This something like G-Edit or Cade Well I don't know Cade is pretty full featured these days as well But what I love about this is It has some really neat power user kind of features With that really fantastic plugin system And all the cool syntax highlighting The various color schemes You got your project tree view here on the side And again there's a lot of third party plugins Out there available for you It is under Active Development It is also free and open source software I didn't mention that But over on their GitHub It is licensed under the MIT license So for years I have been recommending people That didn't want to go the Vim or the Emacs route You just want a regular text editor For years Genie has been the one I pretty much universally recommend Go try Genie for a nice text editor slash IDE But honestly Just a little bit of time I've played with Light XL I think this is going to start being the Non Vim, Non Emacs text editor that I tell people Go try And it's not just for Linux I say go try for you guys Watching my channel Most of you guys are Linux users But it is also available on Windows It's available on Mac They've got binary packages Over on their GitHub They have an app image Also over on their GitHub Go check out the releases on the GitHub page For those of you on Arch Linux Or Arch-based distributions like I am I found Light XL In the AUR So I installed it with Paru Now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode And of course I'm talking about Daniel Gabe James Matt Paul Royal West Homer Dragon Commander Ingrid George Lee Mathos Nate Irion Paul Peace Archimvedora Realities for less Red Prophet Roland Soledadstri Tools Devler Wardgentu And Ubuntu And Willy These guys They're my high-steered patrons Over on Patreon Without these guys This quick look at Light XL It wouldn't have been possible The show is also brought to you By each and every one of these Fine ladies and gentlemen All these wonderful names you're seeing These wonderful people that help support my work Because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys, the community If you like my work And want to see more videos about Linux And free and open source software Subscribe to DistroTube Over on Patreon Peace guys