Editors - For Professor Futrelle's classes

Professor Futrelle

Version of 11 March 2003 - updated 4 September 2005

Since many of my class programming projects are required to compile and run on our Unix systems, Unix editors are the most relevant. What follows is a brief list of editors.

Emacs
This is probably the dominant one. It is language-sensitive so it understands parenthesis balancing and a bit more. I have a web page devoted to Emacs here.
Vi
Vi is another popular editor that I used to use. Here's the Vi Lovers page, full of resources. There's also a visual version, VIM. Info here.
Pico
Many use Pico. I never have. Look at its man page or search the web or ask a friend.
JEdit
Being a serious Java user, it's interesting to note that there's a quite good and extensible editor written entirely in Java, JEdit. (It runs fine for me on Solaris and on my Mac.) You'll have to download it; easy enough. Here's the main JEdit site. It has over 80 plugins that you can choose to download to add to its functionality -- and you can write your own.
BBEdit
My web development is done almost exclusively on my Mac G4 Powerbook using BBEdit. I also use it for Java development on my Mac, under OS X.

IDEs - Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio

With the advent of free, powerful, IDEs, many have moved to editing and developing on IDEs. Eclipse and NetBeans are Java-based and run virtually anywhere. Currently (2005) I use Eclipse and CVS in my own research work. Subversion may be in my future, when it's really nicely integrated into Eclipse. Eclipse is easy to download and install. Eclipse is installed on the CCIS Solaris and Windows machines. Visual Studio is Windows-only.


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