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I still use nedit, thought it hasn't had any decent upgrade in years. Nonmodal (modal is why I don't like vi/vim), simple, easy to hack regex based syntax highlighting (though that can be tripped up sometimes - I'm looking at you Perl), simple enough to get out of your way (I'm looking at you emacs), and fast with no lag (I'm looking at you jEdit).

a port of Debian's APT to Mac OS X would help.

What, you mean this? Or maybe this? Apt has been on OS X for ages, I mean ages! As an Apple/linux/unix user, I've liked Apple because they go out of their way to provide compatability with other unixes (hello, X11.app!). I haven't looked into this new app store in any way shape or form, because I'm far too happy with the current state of affairs. Hell, the text editor I use last released a version in 2004! Pardon me if I'm skeptical of claims that Apple is locking down OS X and shutting others out...

I've since added both cscope and freescope, as well as the old Red Hat Source Navigator for good measure.

Emacs vs. vi?? They both suck!!

I really like NEdit, and so do many of the folks at work. A few holdouts do use Emacs but any appeal it may have is lost on me. The standard GNU Xemacs doesn't even have different open files show up in different tabs. My idea of a good programmers editor left the terminal window behind a long time ago, but emacs seems to still be stuck there.

NEdit should be just perfect.

It does support column selection (hold down control and select with the mouse). It is very fast and nice for basic text-editing, and it contains a large set of syntax-coloring modes, for programming / HTML editing.

Link: http://www.nedit.org/

throwing down the gauntlet eh?

nedit has no stinkin 30 day trail period:
    http://www.nedit.org/

although it requires X11 and a copy into your $PATH.

I added it as a X11 top-menu app, so it's easy to get to.

I don't see any problem with gtk/Qt. There are cross-widget themes like qtcurve -which provides gtk and Qt native themes- that allow you to unify the look in case that is what you miss from other systems. Nevertheless IMHO having same colors through toolkits is fair enough. Motif sure it is outdated, but there are still some efforts to make it better (antialiased fonts are almost there), and some apps like NEdit deserve be used despite of the old look of Motif- again using same colors than your gtk/Qt makes it look quite good.

Having several toolkits has the benefit of being able to have different desktops oriented to different needs. Again NEdit will run on any old machine, meanwhile gedit or kate might be slow there. Anyone remembers tkdesk?. Also, people may experiment with new and old concepts, as GNUstep project does.

On the other hand, I use to work with more than one computer. I love to do "ssh -CX other_computer" and launch the apps I need from there: I don't want another full desktop, just the app(s) I need. In this sense, IMHO the flexibility and performance of X11 over LAN is the best solution. And it is available for *every* app, not just the legacy ones. Even OpenGL apps (thanks to GLX extension) use the display hardware when used remotely

Finally, the look and feel of X11 is being largely improved with Compiz/Beryl. Your pig is a very fast and beautiful one, nowadays.

RE: ["Now on the GUI front.. I think there are many other editors I would use instead... but to each their own."]

Nedit is a nice little GUI text editor, has excellent syntax highlighting in many languages.

http://www.nedit.org/ (it should also be available at sourceforge too)

As far as I've come into contact with developers there never has been the slightest doupt what the right thing is. Tabs where introduced as the solution to this very problem. The only problem is that ancient vi and emacs aparently can't deal with them properly. Or their users sometimes are to lazy to set them up properly. The big problem is when experienced professionals follow suit with some blockheads and a few years later themselves insist on everybody using spaces at any time.
Why should everybody degrade the sourcecode because some dick on the team insists on using a 25 year old editor? Why should we be forced to use spaces in interpreted webapp languages because some webserver is to crappy to deal with tabs in the right manner? Unless there's some exotic situation - which I can't think of right now - that requires spaces to be used the stored source should be tabs. Then everyone can decide by himself how wide his indents are without bugging anybody else with his habbits. And if you're to fucking lazy to set up your vi or emacs properly to deal with the problem (either by back and forth conversion of tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs or by altering the display of code) and thus insist on the team following your whim you're nothing but a fucking assh*le. Get with the 3 millenium allready and get yourself a proper editor. There are enough around allready.

This whole discussion reminds me of 5 Million mindless dumb and stubborn outlook idiots establishing fullquote bloat and degrading email to something worse than AOL chat for everybody else, just because their mailer is so crappy.

Bottom line: The solution linked is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because in a professional enviroment everyone can decide for themselves how their code is displayed, how large tabs are and if they're automatically converted into spaces if I want to use edlin.

P.S.: In the recent years, so I've heard, we even got a new problem popping up: People mixing spaces and tabs in the same sourcefile. Now there's a bunch that deserves to be shot at sight.

My 2 cents.

(1) NEdit combined with exuberant ctags.
(2) Red Hat's SourceNavigator.
(3) GNU Global to generate a nice clickable HTML version of a source tree.

I used to also use CSCOPE, but I can't fine Solaris/Sparc binaries which don't require root access to install (pkg format isn't helpful for me -- I'm just a developer on the box, not an admin).

On the mainframe side, I usually use a combination of FINDREF, IACULL, and CULL, which together form a sort of superpowered CSCOPE, but I'm not aware of a similar tool in the UNIX world other than things like CSCOPE (which are useful but rather basic in functionality).

Any editor with good syntax highlighting would probably give you most of what you want. Nedit has long been my favorite. Simple, light, and with (last time I counted) 28 grammars.

It is cruel not to provide syntax highlighting before the eye can spot punctuation problems, but a full IDE will mask over areas you are trying to teach in the first place.

I highly recommend Nedit http://www.nedit.org/
There are versions for Mac, *NIX, & Windows.

vi, emacs -- Too much for the lower half of the class. Mention them, offer links, maybe spend 1/2 a class demonstrating the basics and some power-examples of why these blasts from the past endure & remain so popular with professional programmers.

Hahaha. A real programmer doesn't use the mouse. He relies entirely on macros and hotkeys.

Clearly you've never tried Nedit, or seen the things you can do with selections, buttons and the mouse. Sadly it doesn't have code folding, but in almost all other aspects it leaves emacs or vim for dead, using only a fraction of the resources.

Mice are great for programming ... they're just not much use if you're using archaic editors that were designed for the days of consoles.

I've always thought Nedit was an awesome editor. Nearly 30 different language modes, and runs on every system I've ever used - HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, *BSD, OSX, WinXP... The advanced editing modes are unlike anything I've seen in other editors. You can drag-and-drop a rectangular block of comments or such anywhere you want (and optionally all the other text flows out of the way). I've used it for everything from Perl, to C++, to Verilog.

A true (X)HTML freak will probably use a sophisticated text editor (like EditPad for Windows, nedit, bluefish or even emacs for Linux...), but for beginners a tools like Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer or its next version nvu might be a good place to start. With NVU / Mozilla Composer, if you need something special in your source, you can switch to source-edit-mode and change or insert it.

A big disadvantage of many hight-level tools is their inability to cope with PHP. (By the way, the parent is right to say that PHP is a much better beginner's choice, since it is not as cryptic in syntax.)

On the client's side, you might find javascript useful. With a HTML layout tool, PHP and javascript, you can probably do most pages.

It was perfect for us because many of our users were using clunky old "textedit" on Sun boxes. The adaption time was instantaneous.

Under the GPL, it's also free, anyway you define it.

As far as I'm concerned, Nedit and Jedit have replaced Vi and Emacs as the top two rivaling editors. Both are among the best editors available today. Check them out : http://www.nedit.org/ http://www.jedit.org./

Neither of these two editors works like the sort of editor which people are exposed to these days. Why do you have to have an insert mode? This "feature" came from vi but for me it is exactly like bolting primitive editing behaviors on to more or less

In my day job as a senior programmer I introduce new staff to nedit. I also tell them to make their own choices about the tools they use. Most continue to use nedit because it has a few simple features which enhance usability. For example each function has a menu item, and each menu item tells you which key to use as an alternate way to reach the function. You don't have to worry about which mode it is in. Simple standard actions like opening and closing a file work in exactly the same way as other editors like gedit.

So for me people use vi(m) and emacs out of habit. Unless these tools improve they have no serious future in competition with eclipse, etc. Neither does nedit, for that matter but it will at least provide a better option for people new to *nix.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

It's true that there are lots of tasks where mousing is more efficient than 'boarding, but it's extremely context-sensitive. It's like saying "carpenters who use only hammers are faster than those who use only saws, so we should only make hammers." It's a fallacy because nobody uses only one tool for every job!

speaking as a semi-professional programmer and a professional engineer, i think the choice of AppleScript was great. it lets you get directly at what you want to do, with much less overhead than a "real" language. it's also easy to learn and easy to read.

As somebody who studies programming languages professionally I find that it combines the worst aspects of natural language (unpredictable syntax and vocabulary) with the worst aspects of programming languages. Every time I hold my nose and try to read the documentation I spend hours and am left unable to answer even the simplest questions about the language, like "what are the basic datatypes?", "what is the object model?" or "what is the scoping model?" I find it exceedingly hard to understand -- possibly the hardest language I've ever encountered. Its only redeeming quality is that it is easy to read, so occasionally you can modify somebody else's code to get something useful done.

i certainly wouldn't write an app i it, but that's not what it's for. what would you have suggested they use instead? bash? <shudder>

Bash? Don't be silly, we're talking about programming languages, not shell interfaces. Python would be a logical choice -- easy to learn, clean syntax, sensible semantics. It's simple enough to learn in an afternoon yet you can write an app in it (and many people do). Plus, people who learn Python have a skill that can actually get them a job.

It's also a client program for nedit

AFAIK, there is no generic equivalent for X - which is a sad thing, since I consider both KDE and GNOME to be rather bloated and have never installed the required libraries. If anyone knows of multi-clipboard manager that works just in X, please post a link!

On a side note, I find having two methods of copying text in X to be extremely useful. And despite what the topic poster claims, I'm yet to come across any X application that doesn't support the Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V standard - every toolkit that I'm aware of has it built in: GTK, QT, Motif (there is another model available here as well for developers, but I'm not aware of any current application that uses it), Tk, and I'm fairly sure FLTK supports them too ...

And for serious text editing I use NEdit, which does things with selections and middle-mouse clicks that you wouldn't believe ... :)

1. pico for quick editing before I've got X up and running.
   
2. NEdit the best programmers' text editor ever!
   
3. fvwm2 a good, fast, customizable window manager (I suffer through twm until this is in place)
   
4. ddd a simply wonderful front-end to gdb.
   
5. mozilla my browser of choice, warts and all (though konquerer is giving me second thoughts)
   
6. xscreensaver nothing makes me happier than xmatrix.
   
7. xpdf simple PDF viewer, no frills.
   
8. ROX-filer a fast and simple file system browser (though I've been leaning towards konquerer for about a year)
   
9. unclutter makes the mouse cursor disappear after several second of inactivity.
   
10. xv in case I need to fiddle with image files.
    
11. xine in case I need to watch a movie.
    

On top of this I have a set of configuration files archived for several of the above programs (i.e. fvwm2 and NEdit) and general system setup (fstab, XFree86, and bash/sh profile).

For instance, nedit, a great editor for people coming from Windows/Mac, was developed by Fermilab, a particle physics laboratory.

hmmmm, the only one I've even *heard* of is JBoss and I wasn't even sure what it does ;o) Personally, if I've got a choice between a Java app and one in C or C++, I'll use the C or C++ app everytime. Jedit is a kick butt editor with some awesome features (code folding is the one I *really* want), but I use Nedit instead primarily because it starts fast and I'm opening source files of a konsole hundreds of times each day.

Note for those of you who saw "konsole".... Yes, KDE is slower than some WMs I could pick and that appears to be a contridiction, but I never restart it and once it is started, it clips right along given plenty of RAM.

Having started with Wordstar under CP/M on an Apple ][+ in ~1981 or 82, I found Joe to be just what I was looking for. If I want a graphical editor on a Unix-like system, NEdit is the only thing I use (I have it configured to highlight/italicize/colourize keywords and other goo in Cisco PIX config files).
It's graphical, yes, but otherwise quite lightweight and responsive. Of course a good working knowledge of vi is useful as it's pretty much the lowest common denominator on any Unix-like system.

Pico? Begone, infidel! :)

Is there any alternative which fits in nicely with my desktop and has similar functionality to nedit?

Close but no cigar, Jot used the DGL extention which sent IrisGL (the precursor of OpenGL) drawing primitives. GLX is now the standard way to do OpenGL remotley and all self-respecting X servers support this one (including SGI). SGI has recently completly dropped jot from IRIX in favor of nedit since around 6.5.17.

I don't have any relation with nediters. I'm just a happy user.

I've read that the problem is that Mandrake uses lesstif and anything above version 0.93.18 doesn't really work with nedit. Haven't tested if this is true. You could also download statically linked version from nedit.org.

Moreover, my experiences (as an end user, not developer) with Java have been misreable. It's performance sucks and is typically intolerable for daily usage.

I had rather the same impressions, as an end user, of Java apps. Then I went and got all hooked on using JEdit a little while back. I wasn't looking for a Java app, I was looking for a feature rich text editor.

Aside from a cool app, JEdit was the first glimpse I'd ever seen of the promise of Java. Here was something that I could actually use on darn near any platform (FreeBSD in this case). Essentially you could have several people on whatever flavor of OS they prefer all utilizing the same tool. Although the original author developed this app on Linux, the cross platform nature of it has brought the far larger audience of Windows and Mac users into the mix, developing plug-ins and syntax schemas. Similar projects, such as Kate or NEdit may never enjoy such a large or diverse development community being locked into essentially a Unix only environment.

That was always supposed to be the promise of Java as a platform to develop on.

More end user kinds of applications like this built on Java would certainly do more to advocate the language than any big dollar advertising campaign.

In all fairness though, it does take a considerable startup time versus a C based editor. I tend to use NEdit when I need an editor up quick, then use JEdit when I'm working on larger projects.

NEdit, and it's apt-gettable.

Install nedit from your installation disks. It's almost as good as TextPad, which unfortunately only runs on Windows.

If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it.

Which is why I use TextPad or NEdit or ne (the latter 2 are open source, the first is $pay$ software).

Recently Gnome suddenly started refusing to start up. Have you tried Enlightenment? You can install it (like anything else) in your home directory, without root access, by conifurging it with something like --prefix=/home/dozer/enlightenment and adding the executable to your .xinitrc or .xsession file. Luckily with Linux you have an alternative to using mem-heavy UI's like KDE and GNOME, while still getting the benefits from having their libraries installed. (You can still run programs that require Gnome, without running the Gnome environment). As a side note, you probably could have used Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server and edit those files on the console rather than using a M$ machine to do it ;) No decent text editor. gedit stinks. Download NEdit. You get syntax highlighting, line numbers, and a whole bunch of other nifty stuff without feeling "bloated" while using it. It even comes precompiled for most platforms ;) Motif apps. Mathematica and Matlab are big, slow ... The rest of the world agrees. Write a letter to Wolfram. =P No word processor. ...Can't copy and paste pictures. Sounds like it's time to take an hour and learn LaTeX. Afterwords, you'll never want to use a word processor or paste pictures again. Additionally, your term papers and reports will be written faster and look more professional. An added benefit comes when you consider that most science journals would require you to submit a paper in LaTeX, so it's better to learn *now* than *later* after you've written your 100+ page thesis in M$ Word and have to transfer all of it.

In my original reply, I said I am an open source developer. However, I also believe in usability for non-experts, which means that keyboard navigation has the be there by default. That means keyboard navigation has to work for people who don't know how to recode and recompile applications, learn XUL, or manually edit config files to make things do what they want.

My point is that if it's done inside the toolkit, then things will Just Work even if the developer doesn't forget.

User-hostile attitudes like yours ("bend the newbies back in shape") will do nothing to get open-source more widely accepted by a larger, nontechnical audience.

Further, a proper set of default keyboard mnemonics will not override any shortcuts you have setup in your window manager. Window managers rule the roost in X programming, and if it binds a key, then it simply doesn't deliver the key to the underlying application.

It would save developer time manually doing it, not effect power users who manually need to override things (quite easily done via X resources, wm configuration, etc) and help people who are used to Windows where you have better keyboard navigation.

It's hard, typically, because the second you change the wording of a menu or dialog dox, all the keyboard navigation letters have to change.

The single best way to fix this stupid problem is for keyboard shortcuts to be automated but overrideable in GUI toolkits. When I write a menu item, it should scan the entire list of menu items, and generate keyboard mnemonics for everything. It's not a terribly complicated algorithm, but it is tedious to do by hand. Sometimes, it will come up with lousy results, and some menmonics can't be deduced from the text, but it would solve the problem of developers completely forgetting about them.

We've put a ton of work on making nedit keyboard accessible. Almost everything you can do with the mouse, you can do with the keyboard. It's a huge amount of work, but we wouldn't have it any other way. Alomst every GUI item can be hit with the keyboard, and vice-versa.

Want to know why I won't use Mozilla on Windows? When a yes/no dialog pops up, I can't type 'Y' or 'N' to dismiss it. Stupid things like this, problems that were solved 15 years ago, still plague us.

"""
Programmers who are just starting out the *NIX way need a editor that behaves kinda-like Windows notepad or other Windows IDE editors, but has cool features, and Kate fits the bill.
"""
Check out NEdit. It's a windows-like editor that's very mature and well-designed.

www.nedit.org

-DA

Try NEdit. It's a windows/mac-like editor that is more powerful than any editors I've used on either windows or mac. -- jason

I've found two notable exceptions:

• vim supports visual wrapping (":set lbr") quite well. Of course, vim is a nightmare from a usability perspective, but there is a young project called Cream, which is a set of configuration files for the graphical version of vim (gvim) that turns gvim into a modeless editor behaving in many ways like typical Windows editors, while retaining vim's functionality.

  I currently use gvim+cream for all my editing and am rather happy with it.

• Nedit is the other exception, but I found it unusable -- hotkeys wouldn't work, dialog boxes would have six times their normal size etc. - probably some X configuration stuff, but I don't have time for fixing this. If it works on your system, it may well be a good standard editor.

None of the KDE editors in the versions I have tried supported visual wrapping, nor did any of the GNOME editors (gnp does do it, but it's extremely buggy -- when you hit "cursor down", it jumps to the next paragraph instead of the next line, which is unacceptable). Unlike some other poster claimed, gedit, at least in my version (.96), doesn't do visual wrapping. For KDE's showcase editor Kate it's apparently in the works.

Yes, you can use something like abiword, but honestly, abiword is generally a PITA and uses the ugliest screen fonts in the known universe, and who would want to start OpenOffice for editing a text file? Generally, I consider the lack of a properly behaving, usable text editor a big problem and would contribute financially to any project aiming to fix this.

Despite your stating an opinion as fact, vi is an excellent editor, and despite your unsubstantiated claims, the basic commands used within have barely changed since the original vi. Sure, some have been added, but you can use the old commands without the new ones. Vi is an editor for people who understand that they need to EDIT some TEXT, and not modify the point size of a title and choose a nifty looking font.

I could drive my car with my feet, but that doesn't make it a good fucking idea. NEdit is the closest decent editor on Unix that I have found.

People want ease and simplicity. This is the same reason jet planes are fly-by-wire now, not the old-fasioned way.

I'll disagree. I've used it, and I'd definitely use it... if my school didn't have a site license for Exceed. I just use Exceed. It's so awesome in a multitude of ways. First, it fixes some bugs I noticed in X11 (try XDMing to a Sun box, log in, and notice that the Welcome to Solaris screen is garbled under X11. Exceed displays it perfectly in true color.) Second, my favourite feature, Exceed lets you use its own window manager... which integrates with windows! What's that mean? Well, instead of having to flip back and forth between a separate window for my unix apps, they all show up on the Windows taskbar along with my Windows apps. Oh, and the CDE bar? It sits right on top of the taskbar! Want to switch from IE on Windows to NEdit? Click.

Sure X11 is pretty stable... but so is Exceed. And for all the folks that are claiming that "X11 is more stable" --- let me tell you, Exceed has never crashed on me, while X11 has crashed numerous times. Plus, I don't care what you say, running a native Windows app is theoretically mucho faster than running X11 through that Cygwin1.dll POSIX patch. Here is an example... Open up NT cmd and type 'dir'. It's instant, right? Now open up bash and type 'ls'.... it's slow as a mofo compared to the former!

Exceed comes with a whole bunch of tools along with it as well... the nice part about it is that I can keep multiple sessions with their own individual settings in .ses files, which I can't easily do in X11. (Making individual batch file _is_ a pain.) If Exceed cost $40, I wouldn't mind buying it... but it doesn't. However, like I said we have a site license, so it's all good with me.

This already happens. Using stuff I know about directly as evidence, look at the fermilab tools homepage. Now granted this stuff wasn't developed spontaneously, every last bit of it is an internal tool that was made freely available to the public, but the point still stands. Fermilab is operated by universities across the country, but is owned by the DOE.

> think a U.S. Department of Software Development
> would result in better software?

Not by default, nor every time, but it's definetly capable of it. Again I'll use fermi as an example. Nedit is a really well done GUI text editor, I call it a "second tier" editor because it's not directly a vi or emacs clone, but it's very own beast. These days it's a highly developed, well maintained editor.

So while I'd agree to an extent that the government shouldn't have a Department of Open Source that leeches taxpayer money to create free software, I *do* have to butt in and inform you that many (if not all) government owned laboratories across the US already produce and release free software. ;)

So it *can* work.

If you are looking for cheap, maintainable, stable software to replace your current Windows environment, then look into this :

Slackware Linux.
KDE.
OpenOffice (maybe StarOffice or Hancom Office or KOffice).
Mozilla (or maybe Netscape 6 or Opera).
The GIMP.
XMMS.
MPlayer.
GNUCash (or maybe Kapital).
Evolution.
NEdit.

Or if you need anything else, check out Freshmeat.

AstroMage

This is due in part to Mark Edel's work on getting nedit (originally developed here at Fermilab) released under the GPL, but also to the patient efforts of folks in the Computing Division here like Ruth Pordes and Betsy Schermerhorn. I believe several other of the National Labs have similar programs.

Simple. Windows comes with a huge default set things you're allowed to link against. Somewhere, it says: "you can link against all this stuff for no royalty". If I go out and buy a copy of Windows and write a Windows apps, then I dynamically link against all libraries in Windows. I sell my app. Done.

Imagine if a Windows developer had to review every single DLL inside of c:\windows\system to check for licenses. It takes time. Some licenses are written such that only a lawyer can figure out what they mean. "Oh, yes, Mr. Lawyer, please read these 423 licenses and tell me which one I can use. What, that will only cost $35,000 for your time? Nevermind!"

If I got out and buy a copy of Foo linux, it has 500,000 libraries on it, each with a different license. Each time I link in a different one I have stop and read to see if I'm allowed to do so.

Now here's the kicker: to get anything non-trivial done in Linux, you need to link against the libraries. But you can't link in a GPL library unless you plan to give away your software.

So, if you want to sell something, you have to roll your own. THAT is what's slowing down progress on Linux.

I think it is 100% retarded to write a low-level library and release it under the GPL instead of the LGPL. (And yes, I write both free and propietary software. I have no paranoid delusions about one destroying the other.)

Get it here

Not really an IDE but a super editor with a lot of customization capability. Does syntax highlighting for a ton of languages out of the box and you can define new highlighting patterns and export/import them to/from files. It's what I do the majority of my PHP programming in. It's free to boot. I also use Bluefish some for the HTML work. It's pretty decent with some specialized PHP support. It's nice for forms, you don't need to remeber the exact syntax for all the different input types.

Editors like VIM are *extremely* complicated and unintuitive for new users.