The popular Vim text editor released new major 9.0 version few days ago with many new features and large number of new features.

The new release introduced Vim9 script with drastic performance improvements. The execution speed can be increased via 10 to 100 times faster. However, function must be defined with def, and the argument and return types must be specified to benefit from the speed-up.

Legacy scripts will keep working as before. The new script syntax now looks a lot more like most programming languages. Line continuation does not require using a backslash; Function calls do not require call, assignments are done without let and expressions are evaluated without eval. And, comments now start with #.

Instead of the ‘wildmenu’ option, now a popup menu can be used in Vim 9 by setting “wildoptions’ to “pum”. Which, allows for showing many more command line completion matches. The updated colorschemes are also included in the release.

New options in the release including:

• 'autoshelldir' change directory to the shell’s current directory
• 'cdhome' change directory to the home directory by “:cd”
• 'cinscopedecls' words that are recognized by ‘cino-g’
• 'guiligatures' GTK GUI: ASCII characters that can form shapes
• 'mousemoveevent' report mouse moves with
• 'quickfixtextfunc' function for the text in the quickfix window
• 'spelloptions' options for spell checking
• 'thesaurusfunc' function to be used for thesaurus completion
• 'xtermcodes' request terminal codes from an xterm

There are as well new ex commands, functions, variables and operators. See more about Vim 9 via its news page.

How to Get Vim 9 in Ubuntu Linux

Vim offers official AppImage package, along with the source tarball they are available to download at the link below:

There’s another universal Flatpak package available, though not updated at the moment of writing. For Windows, MacOS and other sources, go to vim.org/download.php

This simple tutorial shows how to install the GNU Emacs text editor 28.1 and keep up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04

GNU Emacs text editor has reached v28 release series for few months, though Ubuntu still has v27.1 in its universe repository. For those would like to install/upgrade the editor, here are 3 different ways to do the trick in Ubuntu and its based systems.

Method 1: Snap Package

Snap is an universal Linux package format that runs in sandbox. It works on most Linux, and updates automatically when a new release is published. GNU Emacs is available as Snap with support for amd64 modern PC/laptop, arm64/armhf, ppc64el and s390x processors.

Ubuntu user can simply search for and install the package from Ubuntu Software. There are multiple app packages in software center, select install the one from “Snap Store”.

Install Emacs from Ubuntu Software

For other Linux, it’s available to install via https://snapcraft.io/emacs

Method 2: Ubuntu PPA

For those do NOT like applications run in sandbox, there’s an Ubuntu PPA contains the native .deb package for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04.

Like the Snap and Flatpak packages, it’s a third-party repository. Though the maintainer has been working on the PPA for more than 5 years. Also, it supports for amd64, arm64/armhf, and ppc64el CPU architecture types.

1. Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Run command to remove the old emacs package if any, since it conflicts to the package from PPA.

sudo apt remove --autoremove emacs emacs-common

2. Then, run the command below to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs

Type user password when it asks and hit Enter to continue

3. Then run the command to update system package cache, which should be done automatically in Ubuntu 20.04 and higher during adding PPA.

sudo apt update

4. Finally, install Emacs 28 via command:

sudo apt install emacs28

Here you may replace emacs28 with emacs28-nox for text-only interface and/or emacs28-nativecomp with native compilation enabled.

Method 3: Emacs Flatpak

The text editor is also available as the universal Flatpak package which runs in sandbox. Like Snap, the package runs in most Linux and it’s easy to update. However, it takes more disk space due to run-time libraries.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to install the flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

2. Then, install Emacs as Flatpak via command:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnu.emacs.flatpakref

How to Remove Emacs text editor

The Emacs Snap, Flatpak and Deb packages can be installed all together in your system. So, there may be duplicated app icons when you try to launch the editor.

To remove the Snap package, either use Ubuntu Software or run command in terminal:

sudo snap remove emacs

To remove the Flatpak package, use command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.gnu.emacs

And clear useless runtime via flatpak uninstall --unused.

To remove the Deb package, run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove emacs28 emacs28-common

And remove the Ubuntu PPA via command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:kelleyk/emacs

The free open-source text and source code editor, Atom, is reaching the end of life!

Github, who is behind the editor, announced on June 8:

Today, we’re announcing that we are sunsetting Atom and will archive all projects under the organization on December 15, 2022.

Atom is cross-platform code editor developed by Github, the code hosting platform itself. It’s promoted as a “hackable text editor for the 21st Century”, as it is fully customizable in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The end-of-life announcement explained that Atom has no significant feature development for the past several years. The community involvement has declined significantly. So, they decided to sunset the project.

You know, Atom is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Visual Studio (VS) Code. And, Microsoft acquired Github on June 4, 2018. That could be the real reason (IMO) though it takes 4 years 😄.

Anyhow, there are 6 months until the developer team archive the atom/atom repository. It’s time for those still using Atom to migrate to an alternative solution.

Alternative Code Editors:

There are quite a few good alternatives to Atom. Though I’m not a software developer, there are Sublime Text, Visual Studio (VS) Code, PyCharm, Brackets, Notepad++ as I know.

Ghostwriter, free and open-source markdown text editor, released version 2.1.0 with some new features. Here’s what’s new and how to install in Ubuntu.

Ghostwriter is a cross-platform, aesthetic and distraction-free Markdown editor works on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. It comes with live HTML preview, dark and light mode, focus mode, hemingway mode, autosave, MathJax, and built-in Cheat Sheet in the sidebar (toggle via F1) in case you forgot some Markdown syntax.

By releasing v2.1.0, it now auto-saves untitled documents to a draft folder, and provides a button in ‘Preferences’ to open that folder (it’s user Documents folder in my case).

And, it loads the last opened file on startup while providing an option to toggle on/off this feature. The bottom status bar can now display a different statistic. By clicking on it, you may choose to display how many words, characters, pages, sentences, paragraphs, or read time, write time, wpm, etc.

How to Install The Latest Ghostwriter 2.1.0 in Ubuntu:

The text editor has an official PPA that so far supports for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 21.04. The Ubuntu 21.10 package is somehow not updated at the moment, you may check the link page though.

1.) Add the PPA:

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, run the command below to add the PPA repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wereturtle/ppa

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

2.) Refresh system package cache by running command in terminal. This is done automatically in Ubuntu 20.04 & higher while adding PPA, but some Ubuntu based systems may not.

sudo apt update

3.) Finally install ghostwriter via command:

sudo apt install ghostwriter

The software team also maintains Copr repository for Fedora 33/34/35 and rawhide users. Simply open terminal and run commands below one by one will install it in Fedora:

sudo dnf copr enable wereturtle/stable

sudo dnf install ghostwriter

Uninstall Ghostwriter:

To remove the markdown editor, open terminal and run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove ghostwriter

And remove the Ubuntu PPA using “Software & Updates” utility under Other Software tab: