Hi, >> But I must say that the first thing that prevent to use the >device to >> do programm is the lack of a good editor adatpted to it. > >Slightly off-topic and maybe? a little bit flamebait, but I >have never found an editor adapted for programming that wasn't >a pain to use in UN*X. You mean graphical editor or text mode editor? I guess you dislike vi like I do, so here is a list of other editors: Modern graphical UI: - kate (KDE text editor, works fine on Gnome, this is my favourite, very similar to UltraEdit editor on Windows) - gedit (Gnome text editor, this has nearly the same feature set as Kate, but some little things are missing) Older style graphical UI: - XEmacs (Emacs for X, with non-standard UI) Text mode editors: - nano (small text mode editor which is easy to use) - nano-tiny (about the same as nano, but smaller footprint) - pico (looks pretty much the same as nano and is also easy to use, but not very advanced for programming, especially easy for those who have used pine text mode mail program) - emacs (the traditional editor for linux etc., some people love it, some hate it because of the commands being CTRL+X+CTRL+...+..., in my opinion still a lot more user friendly and intuitive than vi). - then there is the vi and vim for those who have different modes in their brain for typing and moving the cursor. You can play Kraftwerk-robot with this one. Some love vi and some hate it. >Of the top of my head it should be able to do: >- Unicode (including double-width characters) kate can do I guess >- non-variable width fonts (having a variable width font in kate can do that too >any kind of entry field is an accident waiting to happen) >- undo Of course kate has this >- virtual word wrapping (and I do mean _words_, not wrapping >individual characters, like emacs does the latter) I guess kate does this >- If the new line after virtual word wrapping is still too >long, then insert a virtual linebreak inside it anyway, until >it's fitting into the width of the client area I guess kate does this >- syntax highlighting (a simple finite state machine dumpfile >is enough, ala "joe's own editor") kate does this >- search / replace without 36 random reserved characters >(while regexps are nice, being _forced_ to use them is a pain, >especially when searching & replacing in a text that is itself >a regexp ;)) kate has search-replace which works perfectly to me >- command line option to jump to line/column number on load Well Kate don't have this most likely. However, when you load the text, you can CTRL+G and type the line number where you want to go. >- interface for filling extra columns like: > - line number kate has this > - breakpoint (modifyable) you should check out some IDEs if you need breakpoints > - misc user-defined flag > - line currently debugging on you should check out some IDEs if you need these > - (subversion) blame annotation you should check out some IDEs if you need breakpoints > - (subversion) line last changed on date you should check out some IDEs if you need breakpoints > - line the user is currently on kate has this > - line the other people viewing this file are currently on nope > - and so on... >- folding of blocks kate has this >- virtual concatenation of files (I'd really prefer the >_filesystem_ to support that, but...) ?? >- every time someone writes "." and then pauses for 1 second, >call external tool (with all the text on stdin?) (Intellisense :)) ??? >- every time I press the Newline key in order to create a new >line, repeat the leading whitespace from the line I came from >on the new line (and I mean, exactly, not expanding tabs, not >grouping spaces into tabs, not trying to backstab me, ...) kate puts indent characters there, which means spaces if the person likes to keep the file human readable with any editor / viewer etc. >- keep the file open while editing, so it shows up inside >/proc/<pid>/fd/ (or lsof). No really, nobody's gonna die of >that one file descriptor. >- double-clicking on a word selects it. A word is delimited by >one of " )}]>". If one really must make it more complex, >ignore (only) trailing punctuation in that selection. I think kate does pretty well with double click selecting, works about the same as in UltraEdit. >User interface: >- no (control-..., whatever) key combinations for essential stuff The standard UI way in all modern desktop environments including Gnome, KDE, Windows, MacOSX is: CTRL-C for copy CTRL-X for cut CTRL-V for paste I am pretty sure you want to have the standard CTRL-something keys on place. >- no mode-change keys (that means you, vi) (having to change >mode 5 times or more in 1 minute is too much) (that does >include not having "stuck" keys like Ctrl-K) kate doesn't have different modes, it is always available >- have function keys that actually do something (and I do mean >like Save, Search, ... and not inserting gibberish into the text ;)) I think kate has this >- being able to move whereever I want on a line, also within >the empty (*cough* "non-existant") parts to the right >- Ctrl+Click on a word -> call a tool, passing the word, file >and position >- don't destroy the text buffer when the window is resized >(some versions of emacs did that) kate don't have the same set of bugs than emacs does >Nice to have but not essential: >- autosave kate has this >- backup files (I'd really prefer the _filesystem_ to support >that, but...) kate has this >- session saving support (remote saving, like the desktop >saying "save all now" to all applications so that some "make" >process uses the new version of the edited files) Kate has this >- usable without X/framebuffer/graphics terminal Aha, now you wrote this after getting on this mail this far. kate does not do this since it is graphical text editor Your choices are very limited with this restriction. I always use nano when using text mode to e.g. fix xorg.conf when my unstable Ubuntu installation is broken, but all other occasions, I use either gedit or kate. Except of course when I am hacking our EFIS code if Kate (not the editor but the person) has already opened the file to emacs - she loves emacs, so I use emacs occasionally because I don't bother sometimes to lauch my own editor - emacs is usable for me occasionally. However, I am totally vi-impaired, I pretty much quit from vi with kill-command. >_Not_ to have: >- tabs -> the window manager, not the application, manages windows kate and gedit has tabs and I love that, that is one of the key features why I went from emacs to kate / gedit. So I disagree with this one. >- multiple buffers -> the process manager, not the >application, manages processes this is another feature that I want to *have*, couldn't live without So I disagree with this one even more. >Hm, maybe with a little evil hacking I can get GtkTextView to >support most of that... I wonder... (the folding of blocks is >something that will hurt to implement, though...) kate has this feature and I love it and use it frequently I use a mixture of desktop enviroments which usually means Gnome desktop with some KDE apps that are currently missing from the Gnome desktop. Best Wishes, Karoliina
