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21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks)
LinuxLinks has compiled
a list of "the best" text editors for Linux. "Whatever the level
of sophistication of the editor, they typically have a common set of
functionality, such as searching/replacing text, formatting text,
undo/redo, importing files, as well as moving text within the
file. However, many of the editors included in this article are
feature-rich, and can be further extended using plugins and
libraries."
(Log in to post comments)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 13:33 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Of course, somebody has to complain that their favorite editor got left out completely, and I guess it has to be me: when in a terminal window (which is a lot of the time), I prefer joe. Yes, I'm weird. But it works for me.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:20 UTC (Tue) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
My favorite editor was also left out: NEdit. It's awesome and I've been using it for 15 years.
nedit Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:36 UTC (Tue) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]
'Me too'. I got used to it on Irix machines some time ago, now I can't stand any other X11-based editor. (For small administrative tasks in the terminal, I use whatever is available, but prefer nano.)
I do worry about its future; it uses Motif as its toolkit, which is on its way out.
xedit! Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
nedit? Bah. I know one guy who's favourite editor is xedit. He is believed
sane.
nedit Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:54 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]
Can also use lesstif (a Motif clone). Essentially, even if Motif disappears
or your system doesn't have Motif libraries, lesstif is still around so you should have no problems. I have a feeling someone may be GTK-ising it somewhere too.
nedit Posted Aug 26, 2008 19:00 UTC (Tue) by qg6te2 (subscriber, #52587) [Link] Nedit is (was?) great, though it has been showing its age for a while: the lack of support for anti-aliased fonts does grate the eye.
nedit Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:43 UTC (Tue) by alextingle (subscriber, #20593) [Link]
Nedit gets my vote, too.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 11:11 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]
Same here. I use NEdit and vim.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:25 UTC (Tue) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]
Yay for joe. Joe users unite! :)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 19:54 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
You too? Maybe we need a Fedora Joe SIG.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 1:34 UTC (Wed) by Bisqwit (subscriber, #29589) [Link]
Me three. Joe rules. Especially now that it has syntax highlighting (finally)! :)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:38 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
Joe's good, yeah. I used to make that available to less savvy users who needed something friendlier than vi.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:43 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Well, nano made the list, and it's a clone of pico. On my Slackware box, jpico is a symlink to joe. So, perhaps a near relative of your preferred editor is on the list. And I don't think it's weird that you prefer using joe; it's a decent editor that works well for a lot of users. And besides, I use KWrite (which didn't make the list, either, although Kate [a similar editor] did).
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:51 UTC (Tue) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]
Kate has the virtue of handling very large files correctly. I had to do some surgery on a 7 MB Radmind transcript and Kate was quick at it. These days I really hate to see editors designed to do operations on an entire file pulled into memory. That same 7 MB file brought kedit to it's knees on a 3.5 GB machine.
Kate also has a friendly take on project orientation. It has syntax highlighting for a number of languages and seems a decent programmer's editor.
Others have mentioned Joe and that is my favorite console editor as well. It also does a classy job on big files.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:32 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
*Seven* megabytes is large? I thought Emacs and XEmacs had suboptimal
handling of large files because of their hundreds-megabyte-range buffer size limits and slow end-of-line detection in such buffers... but any editor which eats gigabytes of memory loading in 7Mb deserves throwing out. More, it deserves ritual burning, in front of the editor's developers, following which those developers should be restricted to a ZX81 for the next year or so (until they learn better).
Anything else would just be extremism.
Bloat I say, bloat!! Posted Aug 26, 2008 19:51 UTC (Tue) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link]
sed is your friend:
From:
>> I would hope so, tomorrow will be 21.1's 3rd birthday! (I wasn't able
The most recent release of Emacs was 21.3, which was released about a
My impression is that Tom was previously using something like Emacs
---
---
---
ed?! What luxury! In the days ... it was echo and cat for us...
---
% cat << FOO >> file.c
Oh, maybe you have a luxury shell with echo built in :)
---
Bloat I say, bloat!! Posted Aug 26, 2008 20:20 UTC (Tue) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]
I loved that episode of Monty Python! :-)
Smooth I say, Emacs is smooth!! Posted Aug 27, 2008 4:03 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Emacs 22 came out march this year. Its got masses of features, all of which stay out of your way but are easy to discover, get documentation for, and see the source code of. Its core design goal is for users to be able to modify its behaviour, and after 32 years of use and developement, its very rich, and very smoothest. It opens 256Mb files no problem.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 3:13 UTC (Wed) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link] to be fair, when you start kedit and attempt to open a large file (I tried the aforementioned 7 MB), it popped up a dialog box that said: The file you have requested is larger than KEdit is designed for. Please ensure you have enough system resources available to safely load this file, or consider using a program that is designed to handle large files such as KWrite. This seems to imply that it was deliberate in some way... [and although I normally avoid cliches like the plague, you can take my Vim away from my cold, dead fingers!]
Like the Plague Posted Aug 27, 2008 13:18 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link] You say you avoid clichés "like the plague"? I don't believe you. ;-)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:58 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Absolutely. And mcedit. In fact, both of these two are all purposes I ever need (and vi for ye older unix systèmes), so why you even need to know 21 remains a riddle.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 18:47 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I used jed, now joe (jmacs) as a lightweight (x)emacs replacement for quick jobs.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 23:10 UTC (Tue) by moxfyre (subscriber, #13847) [Link] when in a terminal window (which is a lot of the time), I prefer joe. Yes, I'm weird. But it works for me.You're in good company... I'm a JOE fan too. It's more noob-friendly than either Emacs or VI, has straightforward online help, and offers syntax highlighting. And it is fast fast fast to load and small small small... the binary is smaller than vim.tiny. It is as easy to use as Nano/Pico, without being so lacking in useful features. I greatly prefer JOE to Vim. I wish it were part of most distros' default installs...
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 29, 2008 12:44 UTC (Fri) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]
I used Joe for awhile some years back, but I haven't touched it in awhile. I've been sold on Vim.
You can blame my conversion to C from Pascal. When I first encountered Joe, I was competent (but not expert) in VI, and still had the Wordstar keybindings programmed into my fingers from years of using Turbo Pascal. ^K B, ^K K, ^K C...
But, as I used VI more and more with C, especially fun shortcuts such as <% and >% to change block indentation, or d% to delete a block (and p to put it back somewhere else), it edged those bindings out of my head. That's also around the same time my default C coding style changed to put the opening curly bracket on its own line, lined up with the closing bracket. These shortcuts work much better with that style than the K&R style.
(Whoo hoo... I can combine an editor debate into a C style debate!)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 13:44 UTC (Tue) by daney (subscriber, #24551) [Link]
What surprised me was not the content of the list, but that there are 21 different editors. I wonder if there were any that didn't make the list.
joe, wordstar Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:33 UTC (Tue) by s52d (guest, #2199) [Link]
Maybe they just pick few examples from each cathegory?
I use joe as well. Once upon a time, back in CP/M world,
BTW, running Wordstar 4.0 in dosemu window is fun!
73 iztok
21? How about 2? Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:16 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Yeah, really there are just two. I don't know what all those other things are. I find myself unable to care.
Me, I use viper-mode in emacs. In insert mode, it's full-on emacs. In command mode, it's vi. What more could anybody ask for?
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:20 UTC (Tue) by holstein (subscriber, #6122) [Link]
Well, at least according to allesfresser, there is Joe missing.
If we get to also include the IDE category, there is also a lot of them missing: Eric (3 or 4), Eclipse, NetBeans, ...
And there's the Vi clone ; Elvis, NVI, ... And the Emacs clone (don't want to start an Holy War)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 14:34 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The choice of features was profoundly peculiar. You certainly can't
compare it across editors, or you'd conclude that vim has more features than Emacs: and vim, while heavier-weight than vi, is surely not in the Emacs kitchen-sink league yet.
I suspect the real criterion for feature selection was 'does the list
Full-featured editors omitted from the list Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:40 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Don't forget OpenOffice Writer as a text editor. It does have lots of features, you know. While we're at it, how 'bout Windows Notepad running in WINE? Of course, we could then add MS Word based on that criteria, but I'm just being silly by now. I actually did use Notepad/WINE once to edit a text file, and I'm still trying to figure out what I was thinking (or consuming!) when doing so.... :-D
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:18 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
What about ed?
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 15:32 UTC (Tue) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]
Yay! Three cheers for ed. Because sometimes, your terminal is too broken to run vi. :-)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:26 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The gods require me to link to this, an old classic. (It's scary to realise that vim with all the trimmings is three times the size vi is depicted as, there. How times change...)(I confess that I have added 'eat flaming death' as an undocumented quit command in various programs I've worked on, in homage.)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 18:10 UTC (Tue) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] ed is too bloated
% cat file.txt (memorize contents of file) % cat - > file.txt (retype with changes where necessary)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 21:00 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Sorry, cat is larger than ed:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56740 2008-07-12 21:00 /bin/cat
It's all those GNU features, y'know.
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 26, 2008 21:15 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] me@mybox:~$ ls -l /bin/cat It would appear that my cat is smaller than my ed. (Interpret that as you may, but the output above is correct. I'm using Slackware 12.1 with the distro-provided cat and ed. Both binaries are 32-bit ELF LSB x86, stripped.)
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 26, 2008 22:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's extremely small. I guess the cat isn't stock coreutils cat, but
something BSD, perhaps?
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 26, 2008 22:38 UTC (Tue) by afalko (subscriber, #37028) [Link]
Yes, you are not alone. My cat is also not bigger than my ed:
andrey@kodiak ~ $ ls -l /bin/cat
I don't know about nix, but I feed by cat organic food. pr1268, you need to start feeding your cat more files :).
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 26, 2008 22:45 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Hehe, I LOL'ed. But, Slackware's (ver. 12.1) cat is from the GNU Coreutils package. And, I promise, I have not fed the cat anything!
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 26, 2008 23:03 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I guess I need to hunt some bloat in my cat...
... ah, 34Kb of .text and the rest is assorted rubbish like a debuglink
However, my ed only has 28Kb of text!
FWIW size of ed and cat on Slackware 12.1 Posted Aug 26, 2008 23:26 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] me@mybox:~$ size $(which ed) text data bss dec hex filename 33862 1696 604 36162 8d42 /usr/bin/ed me@mybox:~$ size $(which cat) text data bss dec hex filename 15230 460 356 16046 3eae /usr/bin/cat Granted, size(1) will read through symlinks, and cat(1) in /usr/bin is symlinked to /bin/cat in Slackware 12.1.
FWIW size of ed and cat on Slackware 12.1 Posted Aug 27, 2008 1:21 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
nix@loki 32 /home/nix% size $(which ed)
text data bss dec hex filename 39263 1696 604 41563 a25b /usr/bin/ed nix@loki 33 /home/nix% size $(which cat) text data bss dec hex filename 44371 1984 0 46355 b513 /usr/bin/cat nix@loki 34 /home/nix% cat --version cat (GNU coreutils) 6.12 [...]
I still have a little game of hunt-the-fat-cat to play.
(size -A, a GNU extension, gives a much more detailed breakdown.)
My cat is not bigger than my ed Posted Aug 27, 2008 8:37 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]
> It would appear that my cat is smaller than my ed.
Perhaps you should put that in your .sig file. ;)
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 20:11 UTC (Tue) by mosfet (subscriber, #45339) [Link] From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
*and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like,
'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor
that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) Unix Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed
because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN
SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
"edlin" on a Unix standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely
you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you
are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should
not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE
SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 26, 2008 21:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I posted that four or five hours ago.
And you missed the
?
at the very end, perhaps the funniest part of a very funny post.
(The mighty ed has spoken, and what did it say? What would you expect it
?
GNU ed 1.0 was released last week Posted Aug 27, 2008 5:01 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] I don't know how many years it was in development, but version 1.0 of GNU ed came out August 21st 2008. There's not much additional info on the GNU ed page.
GNU ed 1.0 was released last week Posted Aug 27, 2008 5:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
From NEWS, it seems this is seriously radical stuff:
The option "--program-prefix" has been added to the configure script.
A buffer overflow has been fixed.
GNU ed 1.0 was released last week Posted Aug 30, 2008 12:15 UTC (Sat) by bryanr (guest, #25324) [Link]
A buffer overflow, in ed, in 2008? Computer security is such an amusing and depressing reflection of mankind
GNU ed 1.0 was released last week Posted Aug 31, 2008 5:34 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Hey, look on the good side: it's unlikely anyone exploited it :)
(my mother just stopped using Windows 3.1, jumping to XP and Ubuntu. It
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 11:07 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]
'ed' is perfect for scripting a series of edits on a bunch of files where sed or awk or perl would be too arcane or bloated (or you've forgotten the exact sed or awk or perl syntax). Quick'n'dirty but it gets the job done, emphasis on quick.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 18:37 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
I'm more proficient with sed than ed, myself. I find it very useful, though.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 29, 2008 3:17 UTC (Fri) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]
ed is a more appropriate tool than sed for noninteractive editing when the file to be manipulated is free-form and/or you need to go backwards.
I wouldn't rule anything as beyond sed's capabilities, since thanks to its hold buffer, label and branching features, it's probably Turing-complete. But I think ed is a better (and more idiomatic) fit for the scenarios I mentioned.
If pictures speak louder than words...
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 26, 2008 16:09 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
I think you owe a lot of people new screens and/or keyboards... due to sudden and rapid disperson of potable liquids. :)
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 26, 2008 18:53 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] That is vigor, isn't it?
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 27, 2008 12:06 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Just looks like vi to me. A webpage in a freshly-opened vi. Not exactly
exciting stuff.
What am I missing?
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 27, 2008 12:21 UTC (Wed) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]
Its a GIF animation. You probably have them disabled...
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 27, 2008 13:43 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
They're disabled, filtered out by my caching proxy and blocked in every
other way I know how. It took a while to disable it, but yes, this is sort of like vigor would be if it could take control of the entire OS, i.e. if it were as evil as Clippy. :)
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 27, 2008 12:21 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Just looks like vi to me. A webpage in a freshly-opened vi. Not exactly
exciting stuff. Be sure to enable GIF animation.
If pictures speak louder than words... Posted Aug 27, 2008 9:15 UTC (Wed) by rknasc (guest, #11401) [Link]
Someone has to send this link to Bill Joy.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 27, 2008 11:19 UTC (Wed) by OLPC (subscriber, #47981) [Link]
Nobody remembers ne, the nice text editor? It was shaped after the venerable Turbo Text, an amazing programmer editor for AmigaOS.
The home page at http://ne.dsi.unimi.it/ seems down at the moment, but you can still reach it through the wayback machine.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 28, 2008 2:01 UTC (Thu) by deleteme (subscriber, #49633) [Link] I loved the scripting in Turbo text, I bought the Amiga Forever emulator just to use Turbo text again. I think modern editors are usually to hard to interact with from other applications via script, but maybe I'm just too old to bother with that nowdays..
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 28, 2008 8:55 UTC (Thu) by alvieboy (subscriber, #51617) [Link] I still use fte - reminds me of Borland C/Pascal. It has some nice things, such as forced indent of C files, which saves me a lot of typing (I write, it indents as I write - and does not let me easily change the indentation). It is also easy to extend the syntax highlighting for other languages - I wrote some VHDL and Verilog syntax highlight myself. Unfortunately lacks UTF-8 support. http://fte.sourceforge.net/
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 28, 2008 9:27 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] (I write, it indents as I write - and does not let me easily change the indentation) I dunno... While auto-indentation may appeal to some, I can speak for myself by saying that automatic style formatting/correction/indentation in any text editor is pure evil. Except in those cases where the style/indentation is being applied to a category of data (e.g., section headings, list items, etc. in word processors, LaTeX, groff, or similar). Any time the computer starts behaving as if it thinks it's smarter than I am, and acting all high and mighty by "correcting" me, I start wanting to put my fist through the monitor. Just my $0.02.
21 of the Best Free Linux Text Editors (LinuxLinks) Posted Aug 29, 2008 13:05 UTC (Fri) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] Agreed. I have one idiom I picked up from a friend in school which I've found rather helpful over the years. I put temporary debug code in column 0, to make it stand out from the program. Example:
iv->smp_cursum = 0;
iv->smp_totsmp = 0;
if (iv->smp_file)
{
fwrite(wav_hdr, 1, sizeof(wav_hdr), iv->smp_file);
jzp_printf("starting sample: %s\n", iv->smp_cname); jzp_flush();
}
It makes the debug code easier to find and delete later, and it makes it clear to the reader "This isn't part of the normal flow." Of course, this won't work if the editor (or language) enforces indentation. Back in my high school years, I used to program QBASIC, among other things. One of the things that always drove me nuts about it is that it insisted on normalizing the white space within a line. I personally like to line things up to make my code look more tabular. Here's an example from my "last" QBASIC program, a cartridge dumper driven via the parallel port under Win9x:
' BC1 BC2 BDIR
NACT = 0 ' L L L
BAR = BDIR ' L L H
IAB = BC2 ' L H L
DWS = BC2 + BDIR ' L H H
ADAR = BC1 ' H L L
DW = BC1 + BDIR ' H L H
DTB = BC1 + BC2 ' H H L
INTAK = BC1 + BC2 + BDIR ' H H H
I would have preferred to format that like so:
' BC1 BC2 BDIR
NACT = 0 ' L L L
BAR = BDIR ' L L H
IAB = BC2 ' L H L
DWS = BC2 + BDIR ' L H H
ADAR = BC1 ' H L L
DW = BC1 + BDIR ' H L H
DTB = BC1 + BC2 ' H H L
INTAK = BC1 + BC2 + BDIR ' H H H
...or maybe...
' BC1 BC2 BDIR
NACT = 0 ' L L L
BAR = BDIR ' L L H
IAB = BC2 ' L H L
DWS = BC2 + BDIR ' L H H
ADAR = BC1 ' H L L
DW = BC1 + BDIR ' H L H
DTB = BC1 + BC2 ' H H L
INTAK = BC1 + BC2 + BDIR ' H H H
(And no, I didn't write that code in high school. It was embarrassingly more recent than that. It was just easier to drive the parallel port directly from QBASIC than it was to figure out how to do it from C in user space. Plus, I had access to a Win98 laptop, so it worked out pretty well.)
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