looking for a god editor

At $269 for the download version, its not exactly free is it?

Best Regards John McCabe

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Reply to
John McCabe
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Sounds elitist to me. I'm a software developer as well, but from an engineering background, so the old saw about one tool to do one job well and write/find another when you need a different tool has always seemed right on target to me. Such tools tend to be more reliable, less bug prone and easier to maintain than their more complex cousins.

dilettante: "A dabbler in an art or a field of knowledge"

Well perhaps, depending on whether you think emacs is a field of knowledge worth pursuing. IMO, emacs, like vi and ed, all belong to another age of computing, though vi can be usefull at times because of it's speed of loading.

What exactly are the features in emacs that you like that aren't provided by other editors, other than comfortable familiarity ?.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Quayle

I find Emacs to be the best editor I've ever used for raw text entry; text streams straight from my brain into a buffer. Minor typos along the way (transposed letters or words) are fixed with one simple keyboard command. Text is wrapped / justified just as simply. If I want simple indentation, the text mode figures it out and doesn't fight me. I've never found a better tool to allow me to do rough drafts of text documents (eg, TeX papers, ascii README files, etc).

Emacs also interacts nicely with other processes on the system, spawning external programs that it controls on my behalf. When I was a grad student I spent hours using Emacs as the user interface to Lisp, Scheme, ML, and two different theorem provers (HOL88, HOL90, and PVS).

Reply to
Kelly Hall

Well I can't talk to emacs specifically, but I (and many other software engineers I know) use gvim or emacs. The defining characteristic of the emacs and gvim users that I know, however, is that they are all touch-typists. Not having to take your eyes off the screen and not having to keep reaching for a mouse saves a *lot* of time.

That aside, I find that most of the emacs and gvim users also tend to be very likely to use things like complex regexps when doing search and/or replace operations.

Another thing which isn't something that could not be done with other editors, but which both gvim and emacs make easy is customizing the way in which the editor works. One feature I have made use of several times is the ability to generate a customized syntax highlighting scheme (I have one for editing an unusual document format that I have to use, another for editing IDL templates and one for gcc .md files).

One final thing to consider here is that if one chooses to become familiar with emacs or gvim then the fact that both are available on pretty much every operating system going means that it's possible to be very productive in a multiplatform environment. I regularly use Linux and Windows and having an identical editor on both is *very* helpful.

Regards, Dave

Reply to
Dave Hudson

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com (Gary Kato) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m07.aol.com:

I always hated vi. It just never felt right to me. I prefer emacs to vi, but, I like Codewright even more. I don't need protability across platforms at this time.

I still remember the good old days of whatever that line editor was on the IBM 360 I used to code on. Pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a really good line editor.

--
Richard
Reply to
Richard

Compared to CodeWright, that's pretty impressive.

Compared to Emacs, that's pitiful.

Marketing gobbledygook. "SlickEdit Inc. provides software developers with the most comprehensive and flexible code editor you can use" -- phooey. As close as this comes to contasting SlickEdit with Emacs is the statement "It provides nine emulations (including VI and Emacs)." Shoot, if I know Emacs, which is free, why should I buy SlickEdit?

I'm not saying SlickEdit is junk. But nothing there convinces me that it's better than Emacs. Unless I need some of the platform-specific features, like .NET integration...

Regards,

-=Dave

--
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
Reply to
Dave Hansen

At a [rather high] price.

Best Regards John McCabe

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Reply to
John McCabe

An editor is the most used tool a software developer employs. In that light, its relatively inexpensive.

Reply to
Flipper

Im a professional software developer and I dont require anything more than a good search and replace facility. maybe regexes.

Each to their own (as long as its vi)

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/   ||||   Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.
Reply to
Ian Molton

But infinitely more expensive than the one we're comparing it to here, Emacs, which is probably superior in many ways.

Best Regards John McCabe

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Reply to
John McCabe

Never used Teco in anger, though still have a Dec manual for it somewhere. If emacs is arcane, then Teco is on another planet altogether. Just understanding the manual requires a mental firmware downgrade to that period in computing. Think asr33 teletype input terminals is about the right frame of reference to get started :-).

I guess it does come down to personal preference and what you are most familar with. All apps require an investment in time to get the best out of, despite what I said earlier, but IMO, a good test of the usability of any product is how far you can get without opening the manual. Was spoilt using edt / vt220 on dec minis (mid eighties), which was a pretty good full screen editor for it's time. (Well in fact, light years ahead of what was commonly available on unix) Prior to that, it was single line editors on early development boxes and that really awefull editor on hp minis and their editing terminals. What I really wanted was an edt version for other machines and even invested in a s/hand dec keyboard for a pc, just to get the correct keypad layout. Things have moved on since then though and so have expectations in terms of ease of use.

You probably won't be convinced, but you might have a look at nedit:

formatting link

Crisp, clean, open source and very solid. The only thing I need from it that I haven't got round to looking up yet is how to load the mru file list or part thereof on startup...

Chris

Reply to
Chris Quayle

Not freeware, but very good (for win32):

Sourcecode and small text files, most hex files: UltraEdit32 Large text files (>20MB): Crisp Large hex files, hd partitions, search for unicode text: Winhex

These are the best tools I am aware of.

Marc

Reply to
jetmarc

jetmarc said for all posterity...

I've been a happy user of UltraEdit32 for years.

Casey

"It is easier to get older than it is to get wiser."

Reply to
Casey

what if God was one of us, Just a programmer on the bus, trying to debug his way home....

Reply to
Spiro

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