LINUX TIPS AND TRICKS --- September 07, 2001

Published by ITworld.com -- changing the way you view IT
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Editing Tools
By Eric Foster-Johnson

As a software developer, a text editor is one your most 
important desktop tools. My problem, like that of many 
developers, goes further since I work on Windows, UNIX, and 
Linux systems. To help ease the transition, I'm always looking 
for tools that at least work similarly on each platform.

Many developers adopt the traditional UNIX editors: vi or Emacs.
Both are available in Windows versions and both have highly 
partisan adherents. The Control-key shortcuts, which conflict 
with those of standard business applications (and especially 
Microsoft Word), pushed me away from Emacs. The conflicts make 
it hard to go back and forth between text editing and writing 
project documents in a word processor. Even so, both are good 
editors. See http://www.thomer.com/thomer/vi/vi.html and 
http://www.emacs.org/ or 
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html for more on vi and 
Emacs, respectively. A variant of Emacs called XEmacs can also 
be found at http://www.XEmacs.org.

For years, my favorite UNIX and Linux editor has been NEdit, a 
great programming tool written to the Motif libraries. NEdit 
supports the standard Ctrl-x, Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v shortcuts for cut, 
copy, and paste, and also provides a host of programming 
features. You can download NEdit from http://www.nedit.org/. 
For Windows, I use TextPad, an editor somewhat close to the 
NEdit interface, available from http://www.textpad.com/. 

Lately, though, I've been looking for a new editor. I still 
love NEdit, but I've been working on a new Linux system running 
SuSE Linux 6.4. I've been having all sorts of problems with 
double-clicking in NEdit. I often have to click about ten to 
twenty times to actually select a word. As you can guess, this 
really slows you down. I'm not sure whether the problem lies in 
the version of XFree86 (which provides the graphics on Linux), 
the KDE desktop and window manager, or LessTif (the free 
Motif-like libraries available on Linux) on this system. 

So I've been looking at other editors, especially those that 
can run on multiple platforms. Both the GNOME and the KDE 
desktops include a number of text editors available from the 
desktop menus. All are worth checking out. In addition, two 
editors I've tried recently include august and j.

August (http://www.lls.se/~johanb/august/) is written in the 
Tcl/Tk scripting language, so it runs on Windows, Linux, UNIX, 
and many other operating systems. August provides a 
general-purpose text editor, along with a number of HTML-editing 
features. It really isn't a programming editor, but it does 
handle the double-click properly on my SuSE Linux (leading me to 
believe the NEdit problem lies in the LessTif libraries NEdit 
uses). Because it's written in Tcl/Tk, I found it very easy to 
extend august, making the file dialog, for example, look for 
files ending in .java first.

J provides another handy editor that also runs on Windows, 
available from http://armedbear.org/. J, as you'd probably 
guess, is written in Java, and it provides an interface very 
much like the Windows editor TextPad, including a side window 
listing all the files you currently have open. J seems to run 
well on Linux, with a more than acceptable performance. This 
can be an issue with Java programs, because the Linux 
performance of Swing, the Java graphical toolkit, has often 
been bemoaned. I've been running j from the IBM 1.1.8 Java 
runtime and the Sun Swing library with no problems.

There's no one true editor that works well for everyone. There 
are plenty of editors available on Linux, though, so you should 
be able to find one that meets your needs.
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About the author(s)
-------------------
Eric Foster-Johnson has written 14 books on Linux, Unix, 
programming and open source tools. Eric can be reached at 
erc@pconline.com or at http://www.pconline.com/~erc.
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Text editors
http://www.pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/linux/editors/

About Linux text editors
http://linuxarchives.linuxarchives.com/text_editors.html

Linux Text Editors
http://www.portalux.com/applications/editors/
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