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I'm transiting from MacOS X to Linux (currently mostly using the Gnome GUI, but I like KDE also, so my question applies to any of these interfaces).

MacOS' TextEdit has a feature which allows all open (even new, 'unsaved' files) to be saved automatically. This is a very useful feature because in the event of a system crash all files would be preserved. It is also useful because one doesn't need to save the text files but keep them open instead and then just get rid of them whenever they are not needed. That is, in such a case TextEditor can just be used as a scratch pad kind of thing.

Does there exist a text editor for Linux similar to TextEdit for MacOS X in the sense that it can save even temporary (unsaved) files automatically every certain period of time?

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    It depends on your definition of "text editor". If you don't care for all that formatting stuff TextEdit offers, but just want plain text editing, go with the editor: vim (or gvim). It also autosaves unnamed buffers; reopen them after a crash with :recover. Being a Mac user since the 1980s, vim first felt strange to me, but nowadays I won't miss it anymore, even using vim on the iPhone ... Commented Sep 24, 2019 at 6:38
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    I'm surprised to hear that text editors don't save intermediate work. Perhaps I've been fortunate with vi (and latterly vim and OpenOffice/LibreOffice) but I'd assumed it was standard practice. Commented Sep 24, 2019 at 7:01
  • It doesn't look like vim can work with more than one text file (like some sort of tabs) at once, can it? Commented Sep 24, 2019 at 20:35
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    @sequence I believe gvim can do so, but my usual approach is either one vi[m] per window or occasionally vimdiff in a very large one. Commented Sep 25, 2019 at 10:55

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