Gram

Neovim. No other editor comes close to it.

vim

Emacs!!!

Not sure about preview, but Kate?

If you like/don't mind working in the terminal, Neovim can do basically anything, it's hyper-modular. But the learning curve is very steep. The people who use it are absolutely devoted, and it's an incredible piece of software, but it's not made with the beginner in mind.

If you want a traditional GUI app, Kate from the KDE team is a really nice, reasonably lightweight IDE. Kate IDE

It's like a simplified VSCodium. It has all the basic IDE features, LSP and syntax highlighting for 400+ programming languages, tabs/panes/window support, code breakpoints, Git integration, built-in terminal execution, and community plugins for various other features.

The one thing Kate doesn't have for your use case, is a built-in live HTML preview. Technically, Kate actually supports a simple HTML live preview if you enable it, but only in the Linux version, and from what I read online, other than very basic HTML stuff, it's not very good. There may be a community plugin that somebody built, but you would need to research that yourself.

Geany is quite a nice, simple editor. Very lightweight, open-source, and no AI.

You can easily disable all AI features in Zed.

Vscodium

Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code. VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.

https://vscodium.com/

If you're willing to go into the terminal based editor rabbit hole, I recommend going straight to helix, coming from vim/neovim in the past it's much easier to get into and maintain since it's batteries included and doesn't take huge dotfiles to configure it like you want, and the movement feels more intuitive to me than vim's

Neovim so many plugins and customization you can look st chadvim or lazyvim plugins for it

People here gave great suggestions!

• simple graphical: Kate
• powerful but complicated graphical: Emacs
• simple terminal: Helix
• Powerful but complicated terminal: Neovim
• (honorable mention) graphical: Geany

Live HTML previews isn't a dealbreaker feature. Use external tools like https://github.com/Abenezer-Daniel-1/live-html

So now this requirement is decoupled from your editor.

Who cares if it supports AI if it doesn't ship with it by default?

What do you need/use that you find in modern editors that you can't get in something like Emacs? While there are AI integrations for Emacs they are all optional.

Helix is the least complex terminal editor in that it's easy to configure and doesn't try to outsmart you like most of the graphical ones. Neovim and Emacs are also good choices with comprehensive plugin support.

Have you tried disabling the AI in Zed? There's a toggle in the settings to disable all AI features. I've disabled the AI and it's actually a really nice, responsive, clean editor. Just one toggle, and it doesn't re-enable itself. The whole "AI-native" marketing really put me off trying it, but it's now become my go-to IDE for when I'm working on a project where I want a more fully-featured IDE than Vim (my go-to for just editing text files eg standalone scripts, small projects).

If you don't want to do that, or if you try it and still don't like Zed, maybe Kate?

Built-in live preview for HTML

Only in electron based editors AFAIK. It requires an integrated browser engine, and electron already is an integrated browser engine so that makes it easy.

!emacs@lemmy.ml !emacs@programming.dev
I've been using it for many, many years. C++, Bash, Python, LaTeX, Rust...

The setup and learning can take a bit but once you figure it out, you can move your config file across machines. You can define your own functions, define shortcuts per mode you're in and lots more. Works both in GUI and CL

Not sure about live HTML preview, but I ended up picking Gram as well, on my search for AI-free software. (By the way, I found open-slopware a good resource for this.) Someone else already mentioned it in this thread, but I wanted to add some context. Gram is a fork of Zed, which is built for and with AI. It is therefore already tainted, if that's something you care about. However, I found the Manifesto neat. (It also has official support for Zig which is what I was looking for specifically at the time.)

Oh and I was also recommended Kate. I haven't gotten to try it, but it could be an alternative worth considering.

Which operating system are you on? (Sometimes it's relevant, and you mention notepad++.)

On Linux, I like kate, but IDK if it has live html preview. I use it for Rust and general editing, not for web development admittedly.

I'd like to say neovim but if notepad++ is too complicated then neovim definately is. There are 'distributions' that give you a setup ready to go e.g. Lazyvim but you're still going to have to fiddle with it sometimes.

https://www.lazyvim.org/

I don't think Lazyvim has any ai features out of the box.

If you are at all curious the 'Lazyvim for Ambitious Developers' book is a great way in and easy to skim through. Here's the chapter on ai which proves you have to turn it on to enable it:

https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/course/chapter-16/

I can't say for sure if the developers of neovim are using ai themselves for the codebase, I suspect they might be as they have made positive statements on it in the past. Love to hear if someone can confirm or not.

You can disable AI in Zed

VSCode and Pycharm do it all for me. You can turn all that shit off.

I think I might move to VSCodium, hail libre!

Nano Vim Vi

Helix and Gram. Try em out. Gram even has a Helix bindings mode.

sublime editor has never steered me wrong before

nvi

I don't know about VSCodium specifically since I use VSCode, but it does allow you to disable all AI features. Don't know about telemetry.

Zed has a simple disable_ai: true config setting which disables everything related to AI.

I have never heard it's complicated from anyone. I use it every day and it's amazing.