[Catalyst] What text editor to use?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi John,

On Wednesday 02 Mar 2011 13:10:04 John M. Dlugosz wrote:
>   What's a good text editor to use for Catalyst/TT development?
> 
> The editor I really like for C++ doesn't handle XML well.  I've been using
> "Notepad++" for windows, but the syntax highlighting doesn't understand
> mixing TT inside the base language, and it has tabs only instead of
> multiple visible windows.
> 
> I would entertain both Windows and Linux solutions.
> 

First of all, see:

http://perl-begin.org/IDEs-and-tools/

I'm personally using GVim, which is the GUI version of Vim ( 
http://www.vim.org/ ), which was originally based on vi and still mostly 
compatible with it, but now it's much more improved and a far different beast. 
It takes some time getting used to, although things like 
":source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim" can help a lot, even though mswin.vim is not 
very recommended.[mswin-vim] Anyway, a usable subset of Vim can be learned 
very quickly, and you constantly discover more and more stuff and there are 
many people who share useful Vim tips on the Web, on E-mail or on IRC.

As Su-Shee notes here - 
http://blogs.perl.org/users/su-shee/2011/01/and-suddenly-youre-hip.html
- vim has recently gained a status of somewhat being of a "hip" and being the 
IT-editor, that all the cool kids are using. I've used it a long time before 
that, but it is rumoured that it has been the most commonly used editor among 
experienced Linux users for a while.

Vim is open-source (also GPL-compatible) and cross-platform - a gratis version 
is available for most versions of UNIX/X, for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, for 
Mac OS X, and for many more exotic platforms. It is extensible in many 
languages including its built-in vimscript, and Perl 5, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Lua 
and Scheme.

Another very fine editor is naturally GNU Emacs, which many people joke about 
being a good OS that lacks a good text editor. I personally don't mind the 
fact it ships with many extraneous features that I'm likely not going to use, 
but I just never been able to get used to it. Some people use it and love it, 
but I've known or heard of people who switched from it to Vim (and naturally 
vice versa).

I have a list of some other recommended text editors and IDEs (both FOSS and 
proprietary) here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/editors-and-IDEs/

That put aside, I should note that "text is text", and as long as the output 
you produce is encoded correctly (e.g: ASCII, UTF-8, etc.) and compiles and is 
functional (and may be styled properly), then it doesn't really matter which 
editor you're using and different members of your team can use different 
editors. I found different editors than vim/gvim useful for working on, say, 
text written in the Hebrew alphabet, or bidirectional script, because gvim has 
poor support for display Bidirectional text. And some aspects of the vim 
philosophy or API are sub-optimal in my case (but I guess I can blame myself 
for not contributing).

<footnotes>
[mswin-vim] - I have the following in my .vimrc:

<quote>
" Add Microsoft Windows-like behaviour
" Old habits die hard.
"  - cancelled so old habits will die
" source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
</quote>

I commented it only a few months ago, and while there has been some transition 
things, I'm getting used to it.
</footnotes>

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
"Humanity" - Parody of Modern Life - http://shlom.in/humanity

He who re-invents the wheel, will understand much better how a wheel works.

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