[Catalyst] What text editor to use?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Thomas and all,

On Thursday 03 Mar 2011 04:50:08 Thomas L. Shinnick wrote:
> At 08:13 PM 3/2/2011, gvim wrote:
> >On 02/03/2011 11:10, 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.
> >>
> >>TIA, --John
> >
> >Vim does everything you will ever need if you're dealing with text
> >
> >:-). Try MacVim if you're on OS X:
> >http://code.google.com/p/macvim/
> >
> >gvim
> 
> I second the nomination for Vim, for another important reason.  I
> hate switching editors.  So, er... huh?
> 
> Vim runs everywhere.  I can wander from platform to platform and not
> have to worry whether something capable is available.  That was
> really something I needed back when (15+ years) when Windows was so
> badly served.  Still using it, even on Solaris!  ;-)
> 
> Now if you like learning new editors, or having 2 or 3 "in your
> pocket", fine.  But I've not yet found something I couldn't do in
> Vim.  Hey I rarely need to edit in binary, but it can do it.  And
> hacking Unicode isn't so revolutionary now, but was possible with Vim
> before some other editors.  Good pedigree, barks on command, etc., etc.
> 

One reason why I'm not fully using Vim for all my needs as an editor is the 
fact it does not display Bidirectional text (e.g: mixed Latin and Arabic or in 
my case mixed Latin and Hebrew) in a Bidirectional way (even though it handles 
the Hebrew and Arabic Unicode glyphs fine). This is not a big issue with most 
code out there (whether Perl or otherwise), but is a major issue with Hebrew 
emails, works of fiction, blog entries or comments, notes, MediaWiki entries, 
etc. For that I've been using either KDE's Kate or katepart, the Mozilla 
built-in text editor which has a decent support for Bidi and similar editors 
like that and there are some specialised Unicode editors (and relatively 
primitive by Vim's or even Kate's standards such as 
http://projects.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Katoob or http://www.yudit.org/ 
). 

If you don't know a language whose glyph system is written from right to left, 
consider your ignorance a bliss - :-D - and furthermore some Vim and BiDi 
users are happy with the fact it displays text consistently only in one 
direction (either L->R or R->L).

I should also note that I've worked on some custom formats to facilitate 
editing text primarily in Hebrew:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/XML-Grammar/Fiction/

While having XML, I've also written a parser for two custom well-formed plain 
text-but-XML-based formats, which I nicknamed Fiction-Text and Screenplay-
Text. The parser is a highly-Moosey spaghetti code that was used to replace 
something written in the now (in)famous Parse-RecDescent which may have been 
even worse. I now hope to convert it to Parser-MGC ( 
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Parser-MGC/ ) , but hope that its author will 
document it a bit better, and this will require a rewrite and incrementally 
breaking tests.

I've looked into projects providing similar functionality such as 
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ and http://celtx.com/ , but I have found 
some technical or philosophical issues with them (that listing them is out of 
the scope of this E-mail.).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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