back to article Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

When I heard, in a tutorial video, the multi-platform programmer's editor Sublime described as "the cool kids' code editor" (or possibly "the Cool Kid's code editor" - the speaker didn't enunciate his capitals and apostrophes very clearly) I was puzzled. As the goto (or, rather, the call-by-reference) consultant on Agile Harlem …

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  1. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
    Boffin

    Real programmers

    use a hex editor.

    Why recompile something when its only off by a couple of bytes?

    1. eulampios

      Re: Real programmers

      or just a hex-mode in emacs?

      1. daveeff
        Childcatcher

        Re: Real programmers

        In my first programming job, where we wrote assembler & blew eproms, there were a few units with paper based terminals so you had to line edit (sometimes a queue), one VDU unit with a full screen editor (always a queue) and one old boy who used to type hex into some box that threw it straight onto the prom.

        Colour coded syntax? Even the VDU was black & white.

        Back at university you could write code in pencil and get it typed for you or you could type it yourself on the punch card machines.

        And there were 150 of us living in't shoebox in't middle o' road.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gah, now look what you did..

    You woke up the EMACS users, it truly is the Opera of text editors (or maybe the other way around). Anyhow, kill it with fire!

  3. Dave, Portsmouth
    Devil

    Does Excel count? :o)

    For rearranging your table of values, is it bad that I'd have used Excel? Paste them in as CSV so each value gets its own cell, and concat a string together that you can copy and paste back into Notepad! Easy peasy... if not quite so elegant...

    1. Pirate Dave Silver badge
      Pirate

      Re: Does Excel count? :o)

      Here's even better - we run Groupwise here, and users are frequently wanting mailing lists created for one thing or another. I've tried in past times to teach users how to create their own Groupwise NAB files, but for most, it's waaay too much techno-magic-mumb0-jumbo. So now I tell them if they'll send me a list of the email addresses they want in the list, I'll create a file that they can import. So Excel gets primary duty to tweak the files they send, then Notepad gets cleanup duty of replacing commas with "," (quote comma quote) and a few other things, since Groupwise requires each field to be quoted.

      I've thought about trying to do it in Powershell, but don't know if it would really save that much time. Excel + Notepad gets the job done in < 5 minutes for all but the most ridiculously long lists.

    2. eulampios

      Re: Does Excel count? :o)

      This is fine, although can be done inside Emacs and running awk/sed/perl or whatever you like on it. Mind you, it has its own spreadsheet mode called org-mode. which is pretty awesome by itself.

  4. GrizzlyCoder

    I couldn't find one so I wrote one

    Hey all, I can see exactly where stob is coming from cos I searched for something that could "mung" her example into the output she specified and there is NOWT out there. So I wrote my own. You can find it at jollybean.co.uk under the Textreme button and it will do all bar one of what stob asked of it -- the move of field 2 to the end. If you want to see the 3 functions that almost get there look here: http://sdrv.ms/YnWb3o. So....time to add function number 9 methinks!

    The moral is: you want summat doing, do it thi'sen!

    GC

  5. ericstob
    Trollface

    um

    Not sure if troll or serious.

    1. GrizzlyCoder

      Re: um

      Sorry, can't see anything "trollish" about my post -- I couldn't find a quick and easy to use tool to do what Ms Stob gave as an example so I wrote one using AutoIt - give it a try if you think I am 'avin a larf.

      I will now add a "Move" function because it couldn't do one of the 4 requirements. Seemples.

      GC

  6. GrizzlyCoder

    Back on topic

    As far as editors go, mine of choice is Notepad++ for the many built-in lexers and the fact that it reopens everything you had open before (important for me because I shut down each evening but it gets me back up and running that bit quicker next day)

    Also the search/replace function is a masterpice

  7. platy puss
    Happy

    editing text

    I have enjoyed:

    BBC Micro split cursor copy and paste forward - that was super useful;

    ISPF on IBM mainframe - that was good for a lot of TADREP work;

    Excel - and still use it now for some TADREP. As long as it's not a big data file, obviously;

    np++ Oh happy day when I heard of this. Have mug and T-shirt.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    EMACS?

    If you encode the DNA of the Ebola virus into hex, save it as a file, set the execute bit, then run it, it is indistinguishable from Emacs.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fancy text editor?

    Kate. Quick text editor: Kate. Console text editor: whatever is installed. (Humor follows.) Why are there so many Windows devs here? I even saw an oxymoron in the comments: Windows Server.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    One size doesn't fit all, surely

    The sysadmin's editor of choice doesn't and probably shouldn't be the developer's, surely?

    When I'm called in to fix some box that some git has deep-sixed, I want something predictable, small and lightweight. That normally means vi, which gets bonus points for working in line mode for when faeces and fan are intimately acquainted.

    On the other hand when I'm noodling around in some XML monstrosity, like a web page that has passed through the seventh circle of the Inferno and is now in Purgatory, I want something that does all the beautification, indenting, tag matching and suchlike for me. I can use vi, and sometimes out of laziness/muscle-memory I do, but the other editors are better. I am not a big fan of notepad++ but it works.

    Then there are the monster log files, and here I have so far failed to find a way for vi to play. Editors like Visual SlickEdit don;t attempt to load the whole file, so they load a chunk quickly and then quietly load the chunks around your cursor. vi on the other hand tries to slurp it all in and then falls over.

  11. cs94njw
    Thumb Down

    I liked Sublime initially, I really did. I wanted it to be perfect.

    But... it was the little things. You know, I've already forgotten what they were, but UltraEdit managed them well enough.

    1. HoPo

      Agreed. I tried loving it....but it eventually failed me. Now I just use it like a fancy editor, nothing more.

  12. Frumious Bandersnatch

    MultiEdit

    Sharewere (yes, I think it's part wolf) from the early '90s. Such a generic name(*) that Google has problems dredging up references. At least it did most of the stuff I'd expect from an emacs-like editor, which is really what we're talking about here, no?

    * at least it's not as bad as "List", which was the premier more/less replacement of those times.

  13. HoPo

    I moved on....

    Early in my career I had the exceptional privilege to work with a colleague who happened to be a hardcore vi user. It didn't take me long to notice how he resembled a demented monkey bashing the keyboard to do mundane tasks that can be done with a couple of mouse clicks. I moved on.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Epsilon

    It took 4 pages of arguing about vi and emacs before someone mentioned this little beauty.

    An emacs clone, with c-like script language rather than lisp, that works on DOS, Windows, Apple and Linux and when you buy it, you get the version for all OSs.

    I'm still using it today.

    I remember introducing it to a company back in the late '90s and a few weeks after doing so being accused by a manager of instigating bad practise. Apparently a major bug had been coded in by someone and the manager in question said, in all seriousness, that it was due to people coding too quickly and not having time to think about what they write.

  15. Someone Else Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Love it, love it, LOVE IT!!

    Meanwhile, the hard disk rumbles ominously under the strain of fat, juicy .NET components dropping ploppily into vast expanses of RAM, like ambiguously sauced and -sourced meat products being poured into the strata of a low-budget, lasagne-style ping meal.

    Note that's the way to start a Tuesday! Nicely done!

  16. toddiuszho

    EditPad

    My fav is still EditPad. Not only does it do full Perl regex, the dev team even wrote one of the best websites on learning/referencing regex.

    Notepad++ and UltraEdit are also solid choices. Most of my co-workers use nagware Textpad and install it everywhere, and man do I hate it!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: EditPad

      Ahem if you happened to edit the textpad exe in a certain IDE, find the nag dialog in the resources and delete it then it no longer nags... ahem.

      Or just buy it.

  17. TheRead
    Pint

    Happy Belated Birthday

    This Dave fella seems like a hoopy frood.

  18. All names Taken
    Happy

    You know, there are far more beautiful things in life.

    For example, Barcelona v AC Milan

    :-)

    1. Martin
      Unhappy

      Not if you're an AC Milan fan...

  19. h3

    I use vi (Or perl -e / perl -pi) (System Administration).

    emacs - programming.

    notepad++ - misc stuff on Windows.

    Dunno why he doesn't like lisp probably he doesn't get it.

    (Any program of reasonably complexity likely reimplements a worse version of lisp).

    The good bits of C++0x / lua are based on lisp ideas. Much easier to use them if you learnt them earlier.

  20. awkman

    TADREP

    TADREP: Clearly a job for awk. For the given data snippet it is:

    #!/usr/bin/gawk -f

    {

    gsub(/[ \t]*$/, "") # remove trailing white space

    split($0,a,", ") # split fields on ", "

    printf(" db.add(\"%s\", \"%s\", \"%s\", %s);\n", a[1], a[3], a[4], a[2])

    }

    Took me 2 minutes to write ...

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fonts on your screenshot made my eyes bleed

    subj.

  22. Kiwi
    Linux

    Aurora?

    Am I the only one who remembers this little gem?

    When I was introduced to it it could open gigabyte sized files. I wondered if I'd ever use that function since gig-sized disks were still a way off (at least for me on my budget).

    Or is the lack of mention because the mists of time have faded my memory, and anyone else would be really embarrased to even acknowledge it's existence?

  23. CyrixInstead

    ConTEXT?

    I use NotePad++, and on a non-programming point I particularly like the plugin to copy code to the clipboard with the highlighting colour intact.

    But does anyone anyone use ConTEXT these days?

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