The thread to discuss your favourite editor and suggest cool tips and tricks. I like Kate :p I've used emacs and vi a bit but i flipped for Kate. Some mornings I'd get up happy thinking I could type in Kate (no kidding). I liked the color schemes a lot.. she/it made Perl look beautiful! I'd get a lot of satisfaction from typing 10 lines and admiring all the lines neatly indented with the curlies just so and stuff :p I'd never used/seen colors before in an editor! I've always stuck with vi, and in xterm there's only black b0ring text. Trouble is, when i bumped into CSS.. I like X11 color-names to my CSS, unfortunately writing color: AliceBlue; isn't exactly standards compliant.. so i wanted to continue to type in X11 color but have that converted for me into #ffff00 crud. I also wanted the color-name to be commented and to the extreme right.. ouch! not easy to do in Kate! So i decided to go back to emacs.. which sucks because: 1. I was using XEmacs which is unusually sucky! 2. Hard to configure! Well.. it's done.. nothing fancy really.. it's just figuring out stuff in Unix involves shit loads of googleing and reading and ircing and trying out in vi and a million restarts BECAUSE to do it the right way (slightly shorter way) would involve learning eLisp! Grr! an obscure programming language which I have not the slightest! desire to learn.. oh and figuring out how to use the Emacs debugger which is different from gdb (*grumbles furiously*). ------------------------------------ So, what is your favourite editor, and why? How long have you been using it for? What editors have you used prior to this one? What features would you like to see? What irritates you, how do you feel typing in them??32 responses total.
My favorite editor is jEdit (http://www.jedit.org/), because I can run it on Linux and Windows, and it has a ton of plug-ins for all kinds of things, from integrated ssh/scp to syntax checking for different languages.
Vim/gVim on UNIX-likes and Windows. SciTE on Windows at times. Notepad++ on Windows, rarely. NFOPad on Windows, for nfo's. Microsoft Visual Studio DevEnv's built-in editor(s), whenever I happen to be working on VS projects. I found Emacs' overhead too much for my purposes many years ago and never learned to really use it anywhere as fluently as I do vi-clones. At times I feel an itch to fill that gap but it seems I'll need to get a grasp of at least some Lisp dialect beforehand (you mentioned that). I find vi clones--Vim in particular, and nvi when I'm working on some BSD--a joy to tap away in. And, admittedly, the amentities DevEnv's editors provide, like IntelliSense, are quite addictive.
I use JIm's 4K text editor in DOS (or Windows) and pico/nano in linux. Jim's editor works in Russian, split screen, it prints, etc., and it is super fast on any PC. He has an older version for 8086 to 386 too. Written in assembly language over many years.
I'm a vi guy. I use it when I can, and have vi-clone vim on the PCs I use regularly. The search and replace functionality is unmatched in the editing world. I very rarely want to use any kind of enhanced text, like bold or font sizes or colors, so vi does everything I want. I wish I could use it as the editor in Backtalk, and in Lotus Notes at work.
Acme, sam, wily, TextMate, in that order. Emacs if I'm programming in Lisp. Vi if I'm stuck with it (or stuck with a command-line login to Unix). Ed and "sam -d" for non-interactive, in-place editing of files.
I manually construct 9P messages and cat them to acme :-P (just kidding)
:P http://xkcd.com/378/
Some brief notes on the development of ed and Unix text editors: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/qed.html I think it's one of the Salus books that goes into the details of the history of vi, and other similar editors from that era.
I like VI For word processing, I like WordPad though would LOVE to use NotePad if I could get it to wrap appropriately.
Isn't there a computer software conference some place?
Can't we link this item?
Linked to systems.
Mostly I use the response entry form in Backtalk as my text editor. Just kidding. For serious editing work in a Unix environment, mostly vim. I've been a vi user for a quarter of a century; the command keystrokes are hardwired in my brain now. For larger projects that involve editing multiple files, I'll sometimes use emacs, but *ONLY* if vi-emulation is turned on. (See keystrokes comment above.)
GNU-Emacs is slow! It's slower in many ways than KDE's Kate! With colors on, if i try to scroll up using C-p (Ctrl p) it pauses every 10 lines and my CPU usage skyrockets to 90% - and this is on Lenny, which is old and stable!! But it looks very nice and elegant when you have the Gnome2 color themes turned on. And! you can save/restore desktop using desktop.el (which I suspect is buggy - i had to edit some statement in it to get it to work). Emacs also has dired mode :) You can M-x d and browse your file-system which is nice. It also has image browsing but I didn't like that much.. All in all, I strongly approve of KDE and Kate (v 3.xx), unfortunately for all concerned, KDE 4.xx is utterly horrid! *sigh* I think I should pick more intellectual pursuits.
I use Vim/gVim as well because I've used vi and vi-work-alikes for many years now. As bellstar says, it works on both Unix-likes and Windows (and Mac) so I can use it on just about any system I'm on in my normal work day. It works just fine from a usb drive, as well (see http://portableapps.com/news/2010-09-20_-_gvim_portable_7.3 for one such version). Vim has its own internal scripting language and also can link to other languages, like perl, python and ruby if compiled with that support, so those languages can be used to operate on the files being edited. The GUI version (there are several, including GTK) of vim has pull down menus, syntax highlighting, built-in diff/compare capabaility, etc. You can add your own functions to the menus quite easily. A reasonably large community of users has formed around vim and this has resulted in a lot of scripts, color schemes, usage tips, etc. See http://www.vim.org/ which is also the place to get the latest version. The classic Internet editor war is between emacs and vi and there's really no winner, although some people find ways of counting users to show their editor is the winner. The most useful position is use what you like and what you can effectively use to do your work. In the last 10 years many other editors have been developed that are also usable. At the same time, some editor projects cease development if they don't get enough support. Thus, it can be quite confusing looking at editors if you don't have a favorite already, and you can spend a lot of time finding one you like. There's quite often some feature you'd like to have that's not in your current editor & that leads you to try something else. And of course, if you work for someone else, you possibly are required to use an editor that is different from what you like. This is where having an editor that will run off a usb drive is handy, if there is no prohibition against that form of usage. A lot depends on how you got started in computing, whether on command line or GUI or Windows/Mac or Unix. Not all editors are cross-platform, so if that is a criterion for you, you'll be somewhat limited in your choice of a single editor (else, you'll switch editors when you switch platforms which can be confusing).
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resp:13 I thought you were an emacs user? resp:15 I agree completely: the right tool for the right job. Frankly, I've always found it a little silly that people get into religious arguments about things like text editors.
resp:15 re, internal scripting language.. you mean.. in vi you can pipe to commands OR do you mean attach scripts to internal editor commands?? Emacs uses eLisp right.. similarly.. can you use perl instead for vim/gvim?? That would be awesome! but, modes! I like to be able to just type :p resp:17 yeah, me too, he mentioned that he didn't like modal editors.
Vim has its own scripting language called, as you might think, Vim
Script. It can be used to control the editor. It's actually a pretty
full programming language, including variables, loops, functions, and
if/else logic. It is also the language used in your .vimrc/.gvimrc
files.
vim script looks something like this:
:echo "*** Running SAS..."
let returntxt = system("/usr/local/sas -nodms " .
shellescape(expand("%:p")))
The last two lines should be all one line and come from a vim script
function I wrote for running SAS on the file being edited. Run vim
and do :help usr_41.
Also there are commands built in when you compile vim with support for
a given language, say perl. Thus, you can execute perl commands on the
buffer being edited (and btw, Vim/gVim have tabbed editing and multiple
buffer/file capability so you can switch buffers and stuff like that).
A couple commands are :pe[rl] {cmd} and :[range]perld[o] {cmd}. For
example, :perl VIM::Msg("hello world") will print the message (at the
bottom of the screen)--from the vim help. Or :perldo s/My stuff/Your
stuff/ (which goes through every line of the current buffer and does
the perl command (perldo) s///. Or :perldo $_ = reverse($_);1 (from
the vim help). There are something like 32 functions provided, such
as VIM::Msg(), to help run perl commands in vim. Run vim and do :help
if_perl and the scroll down to Using the Perl interface.
As in vi, in vim you can also call external commands like :r !date or
:!ls or external commands with movement !}sort.
So there are multiple ways to operate on a file being edited. And if
you don't want to learn anything much about vim script, you can use
perl (or python 2/3, ruby, mzscheme, or lua) or unix commands. And of
course, the usual vi and ex commands.
Re resp:17 - I was primarily an Emacs user but shifted preferences over the last few years. Probably has something to do with retiring and no longer being involved with large software projects so much. I've also shifted from Linux with its X Window graphical interface to OS X. Emacs is great in an X Window environment, not as much (or at least, not clearly superior to Vim) with a terminal interface.
Aquamacs wasn't to your liking?
Aquamacs is ok, but I don't actually do software development on the Mac.
Huh. Why not, if I may ask? I find it's a comfortable environment for things like that.
What programming I do these days (which isn't much compared to what I did before retirement) I tend to do on FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems, where my access is via a terminal connection.
I am not a full-time programmer, and might work on 3 or 4 programming projects per year. In between that time, I lose a lot of familiarity with languages, and so for me an important feature of any programming text editor is syntax checking, and text highlighting. re 2: I've been checking out SciTE, and so far am liking it quite a bit.
Syntax-highlighting is useful to me as well. Both emacs and vim do a reasonably good job of it.
What is nice is being able to "tweak" the syntax highlighting for a language. Again, emacs and vim do a pretty job of that, too. Some editors have syntax highlighting but it is very limited in what it can do. Having the ability to add a new language for highlighting is also a good feature. Not all editors support that.
Re #25: I dropped jEdit into the RHEL installation I have at work and am enjoying its nice directory browser pane :-) Had to replace gcj with Sun's own for it to run. Sadly, text rendering is painfully slow when I turn on font smoothing.
When I am working in a text-only environment, such as an SSH session, or if I am doing a quick edit that does not justify starting a full programming editor, I tend to revert back to VI. When I am working on something larger, I usually revert to Komodo (Active State). It works well, is the same in Windows or Linux, and is language-aware, without being the bloated monster that is Jedit/Eclipse/Rational RSA. I also like that it doesn't force you into the model of a project, if all you are working on is a single code or a single module.
How much does Komodo cost now?
resp: 30 - The editor-only version (which is still pretty fully-featured) is free. The IDE version, which integrates debugging, source code management and a few other features is about 300$ as of Jan 2013. I have been happy with the free version. -DTK
Yeah, I'd prefer the IDE for Perl work, but $300 is quite a bit for an IDE, although it does come with some other tools that are useful, so that makes it more worth it if you have the need.
You have several choices: