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[cgiapp] [OT] text editors (was: CGI::App projects)



Nate,

Your text editor project sounds interesting. It wasn't so long ago that
I moved my development environment to FreeBSD after loving BBEdit on the
Mac for about 5 years.

Soon after switching, I wrote this article about my quest for a Unix
text editor that I could like as well as BBEdit:

http://mark.stosberg.com/Tech/freebsd/choosing_a_unix_editor.html

Once I settled on XEmacs, I wrote this article  on using XEmacs for
Perl/SQL development:

http://mark.stosberg.com/Tech/xemacs/xemacs-web-db.html

Those articles are outdated now, because I know prefer to "vim" to all
the others.  It has several of the features you are looking for,
although they don't always have the explicit GUI interface that Windows
and Mac editors do. This was a turn-off and a barrier for me at first.
However I learned that although they little longer to learn, it was more
productive for me once I've learned the keystrokes.

Here are some examples from the features you mentioned:

> little cooshier. The productivity enhancing features include a clip
> library

vim has 36 clipboards I believe, and it's easy to read in a file from
disk.

>, a macro library, macro creation architecture and for perl
> files

vim also has a macro languge. It's also easy to record what you are
doing and play it back, or save it to file for later use.

>, a list of the functions in the file

vim can provide this with help from the "Exuberant Ctags" program:
http://ctags.sourceforge.net/
Documentation is included on setting this up. I find it's also very fast
to get list of functions by greping for them:
:grep ^sub

Or jumping to a known routine by name:
/sub foo

With the Ctags integration, it's easy jump to a subroutine name that you
are seeing even if it's a different file.

> with the ability to double
> click the function name and be taken directly to the function (it seems
> really simple but i hadn't seen it anywhere else).

In "vim" you can just type * when you are over a word, and it will
search for the next occurance of the word underneath the cursor.

Database interaction is also elegant. To send a query to the database, I
can simply highlight it and use
:w !psql -d db_name

I also use perl for various filters in vim. For example, I have one to
replace all form elements in a page with tmpl_var variables with the
same names.

Plus it has features for manually and auto-indenting my code, switching
between Mac, Dos and Unix line-break styles.

It can be easily configured to tighten the edit/compile/debug cycle with
Perl as well. I type
:mak
And vim will run "perl -cw" on my code, produce a list of the errors,
and then make it easy to jump to each error in the code one-by-one or
see the list again.

Perhaps sometime soon I'll get website updated and give more detailed
tips on using "vim" for web/db work productively.


This may not be the supportive feedback for your text editor project you
were looking for. :) My general feeling is that there are already so
many text editor projects out there, why not enhance one of them rather
than start yet another? If you are looking for an editor that feels more
like a Mac or Windows editor, you may enjoy the "Kate" text editor in
KDE, especially the newest version in the 3.1 release that's coming out.

   Mark

http://mark.stosberg.com/

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