Slashdot Mirror

But I have to say, if "NotePad++" is one of the top 10 snaps... not a good sign.

Editors like https://www.geany.org/ are far superior than Notepad++, but people used to develop on Windoze sees to not know it...

I've loved geany for my programming editor ever since I first came across it some years back.
Mind you, I really only program in C with (usually) ncurses or (sometimes) the xforms toolkit, so maybe I'm just easy to please and not the target audience for the all-singing all-dancing IDE stuff.
I use vim for general text editing where I'm just adding three lines to a configuration file or making a note of my dentist appointment since it's almost instantaneous and everything is just a keystroke away, but for programming it's nice to sit back in my chair with a full-screen geany session.

Captain Obvious strikes again?

The OS then would be the specific featureset. Stuff like this happens already. In professional web development it's almost academic which OS you use on your desktop for development. Apart from some neat platform specific tools like Kaleidoscope, CodeKit, etc. that might tender to specific preferences of certain developers it's just about of nil significance which OS you use.

macOS has a neat for-money FTP client called Transmit, Linux usually has it integrated into the Filemanager.

But Atom, Geany, NetBeans, PhpStorm and so forth including local AMP or other devstacks Stacks run just about the same on all desktop OSes. ... OK, BSD might have some trouble getting some to run.

The OS is all about what you prefer at certain fringes of your work. If that's the case, that is a good reason to move to a FOSS OS btw. Which is why I moved from macOS back to Linux after 12 years and got a new 300 Euro netbook rather than the new 2300 Euro MB Pro - although I do like the massive trackpad and the keyboard - neat hardware from apple once again - no doubt.

My 2 cents.

Of course, Notepad++ is good enough for most simple C/C++ programs, or small bugfixes. Anyone recommend a decent Linux equivalent?

Sublime Text is the [proprietary] Linux equivalent of Notepad++. Geany is also fairly close but a bit lighter weight. Both worth checking out.

You might want to give Geany a try on *nix

You use an editor that's actually designed to handle those, like Geany. It handles inline code quite nicely, and is cross-platform.

PhpStorm does this better but at a cost. Also, they falsely claim it's "lightweight". It is everything but. On my first attempt with a 2-core, 2GiB RAM Ubuntu box, it took an hour to grind the HDD (continuously paging in and out) and crash. Geany OTOH gets it right but is fairly minimal (flies fine with me, YMMV).

I use RHEL5 at work. I hate it with the fiery passion of a million supernovas. It doesn't help that rhel5 is like six years old, and 5.4 isn't much better. Who else likes using a version of gedit so old it doesn't even have syntax highlighting?
 
RHEL 5.5 is the current release version, not 5.4. 5.5 has been available since the end of March.
 
I use Centos (equivalent to RHEL) and the version of gedit that it comes with (2.16.0) has syntax highlighting.
 
On the other hand, if you're looking for a really superb programmer's editor I highly recommend geany.

Is there any python IDE with this built in... anything that mimics the 'desktop' of Matlab?

Why not have a look at Geany? It's small, free and sweet (i.e. very usable), and it assists with editing code in a lot of programming languages.
By the way, the key sequence you gave as example nicely increases indent one level in Geany. For Python, Geany will auto-indent some obvious things: indent after a line ending with ':', dedent after 'return', etc.

If you need something very similar (though, sadly, with fewer plugins) in Linux and don't want to use Wine, I recommend Geany.

Notepad++ runs great under Wine... Not that I'd recommend it, it does come in handy. Thanks for Geany; it looks really promising!

If you're writing in C, do yourself a favour and check out this editor: http://www.geany.org/

It's the slickest C editor that I've ever had the pleasure of using. It seems little-known, though, and I don't know why.

(It handles other stuff than C too, but I haven't used it for any of those yet.)

It seems to be little-known, but I discovered geany a few months ago and highly recommend it. (I do most of my programming with C and ncurses, and it's just absolutely ideal for what I want it to do.

(I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles),
 
If you haven't already done so, do yourself a favour and check out geany.
 
The majority of my programming is C with ncurses, and geany is just the ticket for that kind of thing.

I've been using Geany lately. It's a nice lightweight IDE, and it's fast, stable, and has all the most critical features.

I've worked some in bigger IDEs (Visual Studio when working in windows) and I dislike the lack of control I have. If I'm making a cookie cutter program, Visual Studio is great, but if I want to do anything unusual it usually proves to be a big hassle to figure out the Visual Studio way to do it, and a lot of time goes into setting up the environment. I can see how if you were doing the same sort of coding all the time, and were developing for only one platform such an environment would be more efficient, but I prefer the flexibility of a lighter weight system.

Geany http://www.geany.org/ is small, fast, and has the basic features I need. It has syntax highlighting for everything from Assembly to Latex, Java, C, C++, HTML, you name it. And (very important) it stays the hell out of my face and just lets me do the job. I love it.

I also use Dev-C++ for my windows development, I find the interface to be superb in not getting in my way, while not being dog-ugly or slow.

Conversely, I was searching for an alternative for linux (yes, I'll learn vi/vim some day, just not now), and what I found was Geany. It starts up at the flick of a finger and manages to look a lot like Dev-C++ (perhaps more polished even). The only thing I dislike about it is its (intentional) weak project support, but that could conceivably be fixed with the nice plugin system. So, Geany is very lightweight and supports quite a lot of languages, it has its default settings such that if you have the necessary compilers installed (which is basically mostly true on most linux systems, or can be done with one line at the shell), it'll work out of the box. The same for python, perl, etc.

Then I noticed that it also has a windows port, that comes with its own GTK+ runtime (all nicely contained in Geany's folder, and nicely uninstalled if you want), I tried it and while the first startup is not as fast (due to the GTK+ libraries needing to be loaded), all the rest is just as snappy. Ofcourse the windows version needs a little more help to get started, but not _that_ much more. All you basically have to do is install MingW and set your $PATH to search MingW/bin.

So basically the only problem with Geany that still remains (for me), is that it doesn't really support projects like Dev-C++ did, so for now you basically have to make your own makefiles. This could also be viewed in a positive light ofcourse, as learning about makefiles will prove to be a good skill if you want to do some open source contribution. But I'm sure it could get tedious as well (haven't done many large projects lately), so someone developing a plugin would be really nice, and probably not too hard as well.

Well, I've been ranting and promoting long enough now, time for Geany to promote itself, give it a spin (it's free, the only cost is your time ;) ).

Well at my college we are all Linux, they start you off with C++, but IMO I think they should start off with Python to ease in the freshmen. I would suggest Django/Python for web programming (I am in the process of learning), also PHP (which I love and currently do all my side projects in) as for non web programming I would go with C/C++, and dare I say Java.

You can find Python book online, and Django book as well.

For a good IDE I really like Geany, it works well with a Linux system, and it's light weight. It looks for installed compilers so you don't have install anything on top it as long as you have all the stuff you needs like GCC, OpenJDK, etc.

A great lightweight IDE. I use it for pretty much anything, even for a regular text editor.

http://www.geany.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/geany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany

Here's what I have discovered through blood, sweat, and tears:

* Use Eclipse 3.3.2 (instead of 3.4.x -- I found 3.4 to be VERY unstable with PyDEV -- and the debug shell doesn't work)
* Use PyDev 1.3.20 (or later)
* GET Pydev Extensions -- it's well worth the $42 (gives you an interactive debug shell and PyLint integration)
* Virtual Word Wrap (it should be built in, but is not).

I've found that its best to NOT let Eclipse copy files to its "workspace" directory -- force it to use the existing files. I have adopted the habit of taking regular tarball backups of the workspace directory (and files I'm editing). Be sure you set your PYTHONPATH properly in your debug configuration, turn on line numbering and display of whitespace characters.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any IDE that is as mature and complete. If you must use something else, I recommend Geany. WingIDE is also good, but lacks support for Projects, sophisticated debug configurations, etc.

Personally, I enjoy using geany. http://www.geany.org/

For working on smaller projects i find geany to be indispensable. It has a comprehensive project mode, document browser and a symbol tree.

http://www.geany.org/