le: simple, clean and powerful editor based on ncurses

Today I was looking for a way to give a user access to edit, and nothing more, a remote file on a Linux box (Debian, to be correct). There were lot of options:

  • vim: too complex to use
  • emacs: just overkill
  • ee: looks simple but in the end it is no
  • joe: same as above
  • nano: it was the better choice but I’d prefer something in ncurses

Enter le. It has all what I wanted for my user: color output, ncurses-based interface when exiting (it displays a cute dialog asking if you want to save the modified file), it even supports easy mouse-based copy&paste in a putty session!

So, after a few script lines and passwd changes, I have it the way I wanted.