Beaver text editor.

Using Light Weight Beaver Text Editor

by Lewis Loflin

Beaver is my text editor of choice for Linux. I've compiled and used Beaver for Raspberry Pi, and other lightweight Debian based systems, and Slackware. Beaver is flexible.

"Features like syntax highlighting for several languages (C/C++, Html, Perl, Bash, Javascript, Java2, PHP, Python), baseline converter, a color picker and many more! Everything you expect from an advanced editor, while still being lightweight."

Beaver fight software "bloat". I discovered Beaver in Damn Small Linux. Visit the Beaver Website

The project has been dormant for the past several years but has been revived. To quote the official website:

What is Beaver? Beaver is a recursive acronym for Beaver is an Early AdVanced EditoR. It is intended for Linux and other Unices (even Windows eventually). It is licensed under the GNU GPL v.2 and intended to be lightweight, but full of useful features for programming, from website editing to coding.

It is based upon the GTK+ 2 toolkit, supports many languages through config files and offers functions such as automatic indentation, completion and correction, as well as syntax highlighting. It even has its own mini macro language.

Why choose Beaver? We hear this question often, but actually there are quite a lot of reasons to choose Beaver:

Beaver fights bloat. Beaver is committed to the idea of lean and powerful software. Why should an editor be fat and slow if it could also be lightweight and fast? Our source is written entirely in C to maintain the smallest footprint possible. We are committed to the small and micro distribution community.

Beaver has staying power. To date it has survived two different administrative change-overs, and it remains the text-editor of choice in some of the world's smallest Linux distributions.

In the case of Raspberry Pi Beaver isn't bloated like Geany and has more useful features than Leafpad.

Installing Beaver

There are two ways to install Beaver on your Linux system. One can download and install a package or compile from source. I have compiled three packages for Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Slackware as listed below. (They only work on their respective systems.)

Note: 32-bit won't work on a 64-bit system!

On my computer website:

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