"What is the application you can't live without? And why?
"Coreutils, not specifically GNU, but the toolset Unices
provide. Why, because it is damn useful in getting the most basic
tasks you would not normally think about done. You only realize how
important it is once you are on Windows and do not have one of the
MSYS/Cygwin environments available.
"Which application or feature should be invented as soon as
possible? An Office Suite that does not require tons of memory or
disk space. There is a commercial offering that does satisfy this
requirement (ad: SoftMaker), but in light of the question the
Honorable Community asked me here I should perhaps add the
adjectives “free/open” for my above answer.
"Which is your preferred text editor? And why? I dual-use joe
and mcedit. I seem to remember that joe 2.x (shipped with SUSE
Linux <= 9) did not have coloring support, which made mcedit my
primary choice to work with, also because it was integrated with
mc. I was a big time user of nc on DOS before entering the Linux
world. However, mcedit lacks split-screen editing and filtering,
and UTF-8 is still a patch/development branch as of mc 4.6.2, your
question really makes me consider porting my mcedit code to joe.
But investing time is a hurdle ;-)"