 I am a very very big proponent of them and I think that everyone should at least learn the basics of using them. But even as much as I enjoy using them, I don't think that it is for everyone. I don't think that everyone should or even wants to go through and learn all the intricacies of using them all the time. It's just not for everybody. That being said, I do think that it is important for everyone to have a text editor that they're very familiar, that they can open up to take notes, to edit a configuration file, whatever they have to do. I think that it's very important that everyone has a text editor that is for them. And as much as it pains me to say, the terminal is not necessarily the best mechanism for editing text, at least for most people. For me, I love it, but I'm a nerd. For other people, a GUI text editor is probably the best solution. So what we're going to do today is talk about the five best GUI text editors that you can use. Now there are a couple applications that I've left off this list for purposes. So the first one is Visual Studio Code. I don't really consider that a text editor for the one thing. And the next thing is that it's not open source. As far as I'm aware, it has a lot of proprietary stuff there. It's developed by Microsoft. So I've left that off the list. The other one that I've left off the list is Sublime Text. Now I know there are a lot of people out there who use Sublime Text. I'm not one of them. I don't know anything about it. So I've left that off the list. But if the five that I talk about here in the video don't suit your fancy, Sublime Text might be another option for you. So technically you're getting a bonus. And you're not even going to have to wait until the end of the video for the bonus. I just gave it to you at the beginning. So winning. So let's go ahead and jump in. Here are the top five GUI text editors for you to use on Linux. The first one on the list is gEdit. Now gEdit is the text editor that comes by default on the GNOME desktop environment. Now I can't show you actual text in this because for whatever reason the theme is all funky on my system. I don't know why I actually did type something there but you can actually see it. The highlighting is really weird. I'm sure I could go through and fix that but that's just going to be a system problem for me. But for the most part gEdit is actually really great. There's a ton of options that you can go through and set and play around with. It does a decent job of syntax highlighting if you're doing a little bit of coding. There's a whole plugin ecosystem here that you can use in order to expand its functionality. And overall is just a really good yet basically simple text editor that has some options for coding. Now one of the cool things is like some of the others that are on the list list. It does have tabs that you can go through and have multiple documents open at once. That's really cool. I think that that's kind of a necessity for a good text editor but I'm a tabs guy now so maybe that's just me. So that is gEdit. Now number two on the list is called Genie. Now Genie is more suited towards actual programming and coding and stuff like that. It does an okay job if you're just doing some basic writing but it's not necessarily great for like note taking. It really is more suited towards programming and coding and stuff like that. So if that's what you're more looking for this is a good option. It's not as sophisticated as something like Visual Studio Code or even Adam or something like that but it does have a lot of features. It has a plugin system has a ton of preferences if I can actually open them up and it's just generally a very good IDE that probably could be used as just a regular based text editor. Now the next one on the list is called Adam. Now Adam kind of like Genie is more suited towards programming but it does do a good job of actual text editing too though you'll probably not use a lot of the features if all you're going to do is edit text in it because it does have syntax highlighting and programming language support and stuff like that all on top of just regular editing text but it actually does a really good job of doing just the base minimal stuff too and if you're ever going to get into programming Adam is a very good option for you simply because it does a lot of the stuff that things like Visual Studio Code does but in a fully open source package. I also love the look of it. Now I like it a lot because it has built in GitHub integration and allows you to interact with get in certain ways. I'm pretty sure Genie does that as well but I'm not actually sure so if you're going through and doing a lot of pushes to get and you don't want to have to go through and go into a terminal and do get push and get pull and do all that stuff you can do a lot of that stuff right from Adam similar to what you can do in Visual Studio Code so that is Adam. I will say that if I were to use this one I would not use as many of the features as you possibly could because it says this has a ton of features to it but I do love Adam quite a lot. Now the next one on the list is more of a traditional notepad application and I say that knowing that there is a lot of language support in it. Now this is notepad qq and for those of you who use notepad plus plus this is a alternative to that. Now I've never used notepad plus plus so I don't know any of those features and I've actually never used notepad qq outside of a few just random appearances on certain video lists but from what I've read and the research that I've done it is a very good text editor and it's also probably the one that I would recommend if you're looking just for a text editor not again not because it doesn't have the things that you would need in order to program and code and stuff like that but simply because out of the box it at least appears more like a text editor than all the rest of them do at least so far and it also feels just a little bit more simple than any of the other applications on this list not necessarily because it is simple but just because it doesn't have a ton of settings as far as I can tell there's no GitHub integration or anything like that it's just a text editor and a really good one so I highly recommend giving notepad qq a try now the last one on the list is called Kate now Kate is my favorite gooey text editor and some of that is simply because I've seen some people who are big fans of Kate and they are just masters at getting this thing to work really well for them it has tab support just like all the rest of them it has a lot of language support it has GitHub integration I believe it just has a ton of options now I'm one of those guys who just loves options for my stuff and out of all the ones that are on this list Kate has the most options this is a KDE application and it shows it just has a ton of settings so if you go into configure Kate you can just I mean look at this this is ridiculous now that my theme here does not play well with Kate for whatever reason but just know that you can go through and just do what just a ton of stuff with Kate and they're just like the a lot of the other ones it does have a plugin system so you can go through and do expand it to do different things I think that for most people Kate is probably overkill but you don't have to use all the features that it has out of the box it's simply just a really good text editor and it's the one that if I ever have to open up a gooey text editor Kate is the one that I actually use at the end of the day which one of these you choose really depends on what you're looking to do if you are getting into coding or you're a developer something like that chances are you're going to be looking towards a more IDE environment if you will that's doubling the words there but the point is you're looking for an ID you're not necessarily looking for something that just edits text and honestly every single one on this list would do a fairly good job of being an ID some of them are blatantly IDEs Adam and Jeannie are actually IDEs and text editing kind of takes a back seat to the ID functionality in those applications the other ones kind of combine everything that you'd want in a text editor alongside all of the coding stuff that you'd want if you're looking for an IDE like experience now so I'm not reviewing any of these based on their IDE features some of them are good some of them are bad I'm not a developer so I can't really judge so I highly recommend if you're getting into that kind of thing that you play around with them and see which one is the best for you and honestly I know I ranked them on this list but there's no wrong answer to any of these like they they're all really good the one that I'm actually looking forward to playing around with the most is notepad qq simply because I've never actually used it before so I'm going to give that a little bit more of a try and see if it could surpass kate as my favorite gooey text editor so those are the top five gooey text editors for linux if you have comments or you have a text editor that you prefer you can leave that in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at the next cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before I go I'd like to take them home to thank my current patrons today Devon petrick i'll make one jackson fm tool steve a separate your linux garrick mitchell art center carbonated jeremy shon odin marney andy merrick camp dashley d-dog peter a crucible dark venus a flat a primus thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time