looking for a god editor

Nah.

EDLIN ! ;-)

Ian

I second the use of multi edit. It has just about everything a programmer could need, except cafinated coffee. I'm using version 7.11. 'Haven't heard of a free version. Matt Meerian

Am Wed, 3 Sep 2003 08:48:20 +0200 hat Frank Mikkelsen geschrieben:

[...]

take a look an proton -

- this one's really smart, fast AND free!

Manfred

Textpad,

offers a host of features, including syntax highlighting for a host of languages. Templates, libraries and dictionaries are available as well. The laerning curve is pretty easy too. I think it's about $40, shareware.

Multi Edit Lite - I note the Multi Edit website doesn't mention it these days but a Google turned it up on Simtel at:

I can't recall if it's freeware or shareware. It was pretty good IIRC, lacked a spell checker and a few other bits but a decent basic programmers editor.

Mike Harding

Hi Frank,

U should tage a look at SourceInsight ...

not free - but worth every penny (249$)

rg, j

"Frank Mikkelsen" skrev i en meddelelse news:bj1t6d$t1v$ snipped-for-privacy@news.net.uni-c.dk...

I would have to agree here. Been watching the 'God Editor' thread for a while, wondering whether to jump in and mention Source Insight or not. If you've ever used any editor that has a code analysis capability, you will quickly find that they are in a different class to your usual editors. As soon as your project grows to more than about 5 files then any of these tools (IMHO) blow away regular editors. There are others too (eg 1.Understand for C, 2.Development Assistant for C). I have use Source Insight for the last year, haven't used eg 1. for a year, haven't used eg 2. for about 3 years. So far Source Insight has proved to be the cheapest and the most configurable. Using its regular expression parsing capability you can even set it up to make sense of assembler projects. I took a look at the Understand For C web site a couple of weeks ago and I notice they are talking alot more about configurability and adding new languages. It may be worth another look soon.

On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 00:35:39 GMT, Spiro

What do you mean by 'code analysis' here?

Best Regards John McCabe

To reply by email replace 'nospam' with 'assen'

The way they work is you set up a group of files as a project (rather than just edit individual files), then you 'parse' the project which builds a database of crosslinks (between declarations of variables, functions, header files, all uses and references of each variable etc). In normal operation, you work in a multi-windowed environment. The main window contains the file you are editing, the second (and optionally third) contain auxiliary information about the identifier the cursor is sitting on (whether its a variable, function, class, extern declaration etc). For example, once you have 'built' the project, then as your cursor hits a variable name (for example), the second window will show in real time a pretty graph of all the functions referring to that variable, and the third window will display the relevant lines in the file in which it was first declared. For classes and functions you can configure the info windows to show caller graphs or called by graphs. Its all very configurable. Once you get used to all the declaration and reference info being available in real time right next to the edit window, it becomes a powerful tool for getting up to speed with other peoples code. It's also very useful for understanding your own code as the project grows in size (I suggested over about 5 files).

I remember Understand for C has this cool feature where it would pick out all functions that were not called by anything else. Fast way of finding main(), all interrupt handlers and dead code (or debug code).

You should now be able to make sense of any screen shots on the vendors web pages.

I see. Basically in the same way as e.g. Microsoft Visual C++, TI Code Composer Studio etc etc, except that the product you're suggesting isn't targeted to a specific compiler.

In that case it may be worth looking at GPS. See:

You'd have to read through the info though to find out how good it is with C/C++, it's only just hit the streets and I know for sure that it supports Ada.

John

Best Regards John McCabe

To reply by email replace 'nospam' with 'assen'

Oh please, no, not the swiss army knife of editors. Who has the time to learn the intricacies of an editor, no matter how good ?. An editor is a basic tool that should work instinctively out of the box, just like a screwdriver and has the minimum set of functions (edit, horiz and vertical cut / paste, search / replace and syntax highlighting) and none of the feature bloat that I never use anyway.

For windoze work, I use pfe (though no vertical cut/paste) and for unix, nedit, which is about the neatest of all the editors i've used to date.

Agree about vi, but if you like emacs, then you must remember teco ?...

Chris

Maybe it's more like a freebsd-ish "make world" ..

The argument for Emacs (Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift ;-) would be that you'd only have to learn it once (or learn only one editor?). Learn once,use everywhere.

If you learn to use a tool well, it disappears. Like a pencil. But learning a tol that well takes significant effort. Ever seen a group of Kindergarteners learning to use a pencil?

Part of the problem is that everyone's minimum feature set is different from everyone else's. One of the advantages of Emacs is that it is likely to *have* whatever features are in your minimum set. Edit? Sure. Vertical cut/paste? Sure. Newsreader? Sure.

You might want to look at programmer's notepad. From your description, you would be very pleased. At least with the version that comes with WinAVR. Column marking is done by holding the Alt key while dragging. Cut and paste works as expected. Very well done, actually...

Nope. TECO was before my time, though I have heard the history (Emacs is really just shorthand for "Editor Macros" which were run under TECO). I started on Unipress Emacs for VAX/VMS in about 1984. Prior to that, the most advanced editor I had used was CREDIT on an MDS80 development system running ISIS. Before that were severl different line editors, including edlin on PCs and @ED,U on Exec-8. I never even used Wordstar...

Regards,

-=Dave

--
Change is inevitable, progress is not.

It all depends on your goals. I'm a software developer, but I have a claw hammer at home in my garage and it works just fine for my occasional use. But if I were a professional carpenter, I'd probably be

*very* unsatisfied with that particular hammer. By the same token, as a professional software developer, I appreciate the power and flexibility of Emacs. Would I recommend Emacs to a semi-computer-literate carpenter for doing occasional text-editing tasks? Of course not. There's much simpler text editors that would be easier to learn and work just a well for his purposes.

But don't try and tell me that a professional software developer shouldn't take the time to learn the intricacies of a powerful and flexible editor.

You made the statement: "An editor is a basic tool that should work instinctively out of the box...". My response: only if you're a dilettante. A true professional can make very good use of that "feature bloat" you refer to.

Tad

Emacs = stone age

SlickEdit = state of the art and portable across platforms

I'm going to assume that you meant to say:

SlickEdit = state of the art and *ALSO* portable across platforms

because I doubt that SlickEdit has been ported to as many platforms as Emacs.

But beyond that, would you care to contrast SlickEdit with Emacs?

Tad

Having used Multi Edit extensively I would have to say that I found Emacs quite difficult to learn (to a basic level) and do much beyond simple editing. Like much of the unix world it always had that feel that the people who wrote it said: "How can we make this do lots of really clever things that no one will ever want to do but make us look great because we can write such complex stuff". Dons flame suit :)

Mike Harding

Me too. "Vi or die!" :-)

Actually, I used vi/ed on Unix just because I knew how to do what I needed on it. I learned vi when it was new at UC Berkeley.

Emacs.

Windows Platforms: Windows XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98 UNIX Platforms: Linux, Solaris SPARC 2.6 , AIX 4.3.3.10, HP-UX 11, IRIX 6.5