64Gbyte flash memory - hot stuff, unfortunately

Thats fine if you aren't working on a developer team and never intend to share your code with other people. The problem arises because that editors remember tab settings either need them to be set in a configuration file or keep them, filed against the text file's pathname on some sort of cache, the trouble being that this info is generally not passed on when you share to file or commit it in the team's repository. I have seen editors that stored tabbing information as the first line of the file being edited, but this had two problems: (1) its very ugly and (2) other editors won't understand it. About its only benefit was that you could set variable spaced tabs, which was nice for old assemblers, COBOL, FORTRAN and RPG, which all used variable tab spacing to imitate the punched cards these compilers were originally intended to use. However, since then all these languages have moved on and no longer require such rigid line formatting.

IMO this is why the use of tabs is steadily being replaced by a fixed, but configurable, number of spaces (aka soft tabs), because:

- all editors can handle it

- the source file still looks neat no matter how many different editors it has been through

- with a good editor there's no way the user can tell whether its using tabs or spaces unless they use a hex dump or similar on the file.

- some editors can be configured to associate differing soft tab spacings with the file type, usually by recognising the file extension.

My favourite Linux/UNIX/OS-9/DOS editor, microEmacs, does all of the above as well as being able to load and edit as many files as will fit into the process memory.

Its probably long dead now, but the best Windows editor I remember using was PFE (Programmer's First Editor), which did all of the above as well as, like microEmacs, being able to edit many files at once.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Notepad uses CRLF line endings. AFAIK, vi uses LF only. How do you deal with that?

When using Windows to edit Unix files I usually use Wordpad since it accepts existing files with LF line ends.

--
James Harris

I hope you meant Notepad++ editor there, and not the Microsoft toy.

---druck

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A team usually has a set style of how things ought to be done.

So of you need to set it manually, you only need to do it once. What is so bad about a comment as the first line of the file? If the source is to be shared or to be reused by yourself some time later a few explanations there won't come amiss anyway.

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Geany will do whatever you want, allows multiple files to be open, and even has a sort of method of invoking the complier from it.

AND its cross platform. Runs on winders.

Not sure about Macs.

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In contrast that's my favourite solution because it can be presented with any tab settings and still align correctly. OTOH mixed spaces and tabs for indentation is guaranteed to be a mess if the tab settings aren't what you expect. Using only spaces works but is inflexible.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:>WIN                                      | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

... but that's a one line fix in vi/vim: 1,$s/\r// Depends. Its simple for Java because all Java programs, including the compiler, don't care whether the linebreak is CR, LF or CRLF. IIRC ftp will do that conversion if you use ASCII mode for the transfer.

Otherwise I just run transferred the files through unix2dos or dos2unix in the Linux side of the transfer.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Sure, but who wants to do that each time!

Similarly, I find C compilers, make, and python don't worry about line endings so all builds are easy.

OK. It's a pity Notepad doesn't handle LF-only endings. Would save the hassle. But Wordpad does.

--
James Harris

Indeed, and doing something like the search-and-destroy mission on all tabs in programs is usually quite a good way of getting slung off the team.

Granted its better than doing it with editor configuration because it does at least stay with the file. I've only see that done once in what |I suppose you could describe as a proto-IDE, and from memory contained rather more than just a tab setting line - it also contained the sort of compilation directives that C programmers expect to find in a Makefile.

--
martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Try

:1,$s/$/\r\n/

(hmm. Is $ the regex for end of line? I hate regex)

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If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will  
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such  
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic  
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally  
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for  
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the  
truth is the greatest enemy of the State. 

Joseph Goebbels

I don't care about that. Yet.

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I zip files being transferred between machines. This ensures that time stamps are preserved (and, as a bonus, checksums the individual files). Zip also has options to fix up the line endings when going from machine to machine.

Interesting. My way gives me native line endings on both machines, though.

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Yes, but I already know that won't work. I tried a variation earlier, editing a test file line this:

0000 4a 75 6e 6b 20 6c 69 6e 65 0d 0a 61 6e 64 20 61 :Junk line..and a: 0016 6e 6f 74 68 65 72 2e 0d 0a :nother... :

with them command in vim:

:1,$s/..$//

This converted the file to this:

0000 4a 75 6e 6b 20 6c 69 0d 0a 61 6e 64 20 61 6e 6f :Junk li..and ano: 0016 74 68 65 0d 0a :the.. :

IOW, it removed the last two characters in each line while leaving the newline (CRLF) untouched. I think this shows that $ doesn't represent a character, just the position at the end of the line. IOW $ isn't matchable simply because it represents the dimensionless space between the last character in the line and the line termination character(s) and that similarly ^ represents the dimensionless space between the preceding line termination character(s), if any, and the first character in the line. This would certainly fit the way in which ^ and $ work in a regex.

So, as I haven't been able to work out how the escaped characters \r and \n should be represented in a vim regex, I withdraw the suggestion that vim can fix the newline representation because I think its behaviour has changed (see below).

Other sidelights: I built the example text by running:

printf "Junk line\r\n" >x.txt

and than using vim to Append and another. to the first line. I was interested to see that this means that the latest vim accepts both LF and CRLF as valid line terminators and that it uses whatever newline symbol that was in the file as the terminator for any other lines the user adds.

This makes a change in vim's (default) behaviour: I distinctly remember that earlier (much earlier - 2005) versions of vim showed a symbol '^M' as the last character in Windows text files and that you could use the 'colon s' command to remove it. I can't find out a lot more because the vim online help isn't installed and I can't find/don't recognise the package containing it: I use vim so little that I'm not about to pull in all its packages 'just in case'.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Yes but these are bare bones, fallback, better than nothing editors. The first thing to do real work with should be be install a decent one. My personal choice is Notetab from Fookes in Switzerland, but there are dozens out there, all better than the minimal OS default.

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For linux with a gui, frankly it takes a lot to beat Geany for programming work.

Without a GUI I'd probably use JOE if I had a lot to do, or simply learn vi for the sake of sheer ubiquity for small editing jobs

I learnt vi years ago simply because it was the only editor I could guarantee being present on any Unix machine I was called upon to write code on, or administer.

Its horrible, but it can be made to work.

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I've been using vi for so long that any other editor just slows me down (my last serious attempt to use something different was Brief under MSDOS, I gave up on when I realised that I kept launching vi by reflex), with vi I don't have to think about the mechanics of editing anymore. The best editor is always the one you know best, just like the best layout style is the one chosen by the team you're working in.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:>WIN                                      | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

Ah, OK. Moving files is more work than I had in mind but I take your point about using zip options.

I have my Unix systems present Windows shares so that I can edit files on a Unix box just as if they were on my Windows machines. No file transfers needed.

On Unix there are various ways to adjust the line endings. On Windows, you can replace LF with CRLF by copy from Wordpad and paste to Notepad.

--
James Harris

I heartily recommend Notepad++ for code editing on Windows.

Apart from all the other neat things it does, it handles CR/LR/CR+LF endings, and can create an output file with any of those.

--
Cheers, 
 Daniel.

Geany is an editor with pretensions to being an IDE, but it's not actually an IDE, and won't cut the mustard if what you want is actually an IDE. As an editor it's pretty good ... but so is the Gnome text editor, gedit (or "pluma" as Mate calls it on this system).

The great advantage of vi is that it's fairly lightweight, and that it (or one of its clones) can more-or-less be guaranteed to be supported on almost any system, so for those little config-file edits you may find yourself having to do outside your favourite GUI it's invaluable. I wouldn't attempt to do anything sophisticated with it (even though one can) but it's my tool of choice at a command prompt.

--
Cheers, 
 Daniel