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And for the text editor itself, may I recommend NEdit? It's got a bunch of nifty customizable syntax-highlighting features, and LaTeX is among the built-in syntaxes. I use it for programming too, on VMS no less, where it works just fine.

Gervase Markham is a Christian

Absolutely. But I'm not sure why you say it as if it's an insult.

and has also been arse licking the mozilla devs to secure an internship.

Definitely. I secured this job entirely through ass-kissing; I didn't do any work on the project before at all. In fact, I worked on Konqueror for a year and a half.

mozilla is the best web browser in existence

There's no such thing as the best web browser in existence - they all have different strengths and weaknesses. But Mozilla does rock :-)

Gerv refuses to worhsip at the 'Church of Emacs'.

Absolutely. I'm an nedit user, although I sometimes use vi for checkin comments because I'm too dumb to set CVS up to work with nedit by default.

Gerv

Use Nedit!

This, and your whole post are pretty much dead on. I spent 5 years (1995 - 2000) doing web development, because when I came out of school that was what was getting hot.

After 5 years the pace of change slowed down, I got tired of the amateur environment that was pervasive, and I missed C/C++.

I am now back in front of nedit on Solaris writing C++ code, and I do web stuff (Perl, PHP) in my spare time. I'll likely do web-based programming for a living sometime again in the future, but I am not in any hurry for now.

I agree with you that Multitasking can increase productivity. When I'm coding (mainly java) i like to run nedit, mozilla on the Java 2 Documentation, and ICQ to discuss problems with people. Don't tell me I'd be more productive without multitasking.

• The Nirvana Editor
  It may not be an MDI (multi document interface) like Visual C++, but then I like being able to pop up a xxgdb window and have three scrolling xterms of ouput from gcc's last runs rather than tabbing through a tiny window. Got better syntax highlighting too.
• Don't foget EMACS
  If you can't do it in EMACS, it probably can't be done (or is waiting for the Lisp to be written.)
• One acronym - CVS
  As professional who has worked on real program (i.e. real-time embeded OSes for cirtical system with more than a Megabyte of Z80 ASSEMBLER code in some files) I cannot begin to attest to the superiority of CVS (or even RCS) over Microsoft's $600 SourceSafe product for managing (or mangling) project documents.
• Bugzilla
  Decent bug tracking tools are hard to come by and this one has withstood the test of time (and the mozilla codebase). I don't know of anything equivalent shipped by Microsoft (or specifically for their OS).
• It's been mentioned already, but OpenGL works just as well on most Linux boxes as it does on MS Windows. I've written applets and games (for a University graphics class actually) that compile and run under both Windows and Linux.

Chirs Allegretta claims that the reason noone (before him) bothered to clone pico was that the pine/pico license was just free enough to supress development of completely free clone. In fact, the main reason that noone cloned pico was that noone thought the program was good enough to bother with. There were plenty of small, simple, modeless, non-GUI editors for Linux. If you didn't like the pico license, you could just switch to jed or joe. You could even choose to switch to an editor with a real feature set while you were at it.

Noone cloned pico because noone took pico seriously as a text editor. If you were going to go to the trouble of writing your own text editor, it was sure as heck worth it to give it a better user interface and better features. The only folks who actually used pico were either a) folk using pine, or b) newbies (like me) who didn't want to bother with the other brain damaged tools (i.e. vi or emacs). Even then, most folk would graduate to a more capable editor once they were comfortable in the unix environment (especially if they were running X11, in which case they'd get a good graphical editor, like Nedit).

Chris's article is little more than shameless self-promotion, with a smattering of GPL-boosting thrown in for good measure. The first time I saw Chris's pet editor on freshmeat, I thought it was a joke. I just couldn't believe that anyone would waste their effort on a pico clone. I could resist following the link, however, which revealed the true motivation for nano: GPL fundamentalism.

Chris has a good point to make about the non-free (and non-open-source) nature of the pico license, but pico and pine just aren't good enough tools to have made the license silliness matter. If UW had raised a stink about the license at some point, folk would simple have stopped using pico and pine and moved to one of the other fine tools. Now, with the almost complete transition to GUI-based tools, pico and pine are even more irrelevant than before.

I've found that most people who work on free software in their spare time are honest, fair, humble, self-motivated, and usually pretty good programmers too.

So, here's what I think: when I'm giving interviews, open source is a plus on their resume. It is good indicator that they love programming and are self-motivated. However, just because a person does open source development doesn't guarantee anything.

I think you got a bad egg. Why not try hiring some lower-profile developers?

To the OP: people aren't neatly categorized into "open source" and "propietary". I write propietary code for hire, but also write open source code for fun. Sure, you might have the RMS/Bill dichotomoy, but many of us fall in the middle somewhere!

The feature works well enough that I'm rarely annoyed by having to deal with many space characters rather than single tab characters. Besides, if I ever want to change the indentation of a block of code, I can just highlight it all and indent/deindent it all at once. So, spaces or tabs make little difference.

I'm sure other editors can do this, but if they didn't, I'd probably use tabs and put a comment at the beginning of the code to indicate what the tab setting was when the document was created. (It's no fun having to figure that out at some later date.)

Wow. Just when you think something has fallen off into relative obscurity, it pops up in comments like the one above.

Unfortunately, Neep was a rather good first try. The last published version is over a year and a half old now, and suffers from several problems:

• The single quote (') and grave accent (`) characters have good, but wrong, intentions. They follow the old and misguided glyph forms ('9'-shaped right quote and backwards-'9'-shaped left quote) perpetuated by otherwise useful programs such as gcc and groff. At the time, i was following the lead of the then-prevalent 'fixed' family of fonts shipped with XFree86. I am sorry for the consequences of my ignorance.

• The fonts are designed for increasingly obsolete 75-dpi displays. When i recently (nine months ago is recently?) switched most of my X displays to default to 100 dpi (and my fontservers to 100 dpi fonts), i discovered that Neep doesn't provide 100 dpi variants. At 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor, -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-iso8859- * is just too small. And i don't like -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-75-75-*-*-iso8859- *, even in its unpublished, more legible form. I made that one because other folks wanted it. ;)

• Neep does not come in Unicode/ISO-10646 encoding. It was a mistake for me not to make Neep into a Unicode font to begin with. I apologize for the consequences of my ignorance.[*]

• Related to the above points: Neep is composed of beautiful, legible, hand-tuned bitmaps, and i just plain have kein Bock mehr to make more and bigger sizes, not to mention merging the existing, improved, but unpublished ISO8859-* fonts with Markus Kuhn's[*] UCS-encoded ones. I really wish i had learned how to create and hint TrueType or OpenType fonts instead of making bitmaps, so i could be lazy and simply make two or three fonts instead of fifty-some.

I myself have pretty much stopped using Neep and am using Lucida Console (10 pt, 100 dpi) instead[**] (though i still wish i could find actual bold, italic, and bold-italic variants so that i could use it with nedit).

Regardless, if you must get Neep, please get it from http://www.jmknoble.cx/fonts/ rather than the place that points to. Web pages move easily, but jmknoble.cx is likely to stick around for quite a while.

If someone is interested in maintaining jmk-x11-fonts further, using the improved, unpublished edition, feel free to contact me (address is listed at the bottom of this page). Note, though, that i'm liable to be slightly cranky, and i may not hand these over to just anyone; i'd prefer for the design goals and aesthetic sense to be preserved, since they do have my name on them....

[Sigh.] Success's sword has two edges. (And yes, Brainchild = Jim Knoble).

________________
[*] Markus Kuhn has converted the most recently (year-and-half-old) published version of Neep into Unicode fonts. I'm not sure whether he's published them or not; check here. I have them, though, and (as i mention above) am partway through the process of merging them with subsequent changes in the ISO-8859-* fonts. If enough folks ask (and it's okay with Markus), i suppose i could publish them if they're not available at his site.

[**] I've been through several iterations of "there must be something else out there that has what i want", and i continually come up with this:

• Andale Mono is nice, but it has too much leading (at least, after getting used to the Lucida type family) and its punctuation is too light.
• Lucida Sans Typewriter has the single-quote problem in XFree86-3.3.x, and it's neither TrueType nor UCS-encoded.
• Courier New has too much leading, is too light in normal weight and too heavy in bold weight, and is much too ugly in any weight.
• None of the other easily available monospace fonts look as good or legible to me as Lucida Console.

That's the reason I use NEdit and not Emacs. I learned these shortcuts and I don't want to change my mindset.

BTW, I've been thinking for a long time now of adding the most common mod*-arrow shortcuts to tcsh, just never got to actually work on it.

I, like the others listed above, use EditPlus on my Windows boxes. In *nix, I use Nedit. Actually, I do not know whether or not Nedit has syntax highlighting for PHP; but you can check it out.

Jeremy

VI/Emacs is great, but NEdit is more suitable for Notepad users.
Making a list of comparable applications is both trivial and questionable. The ideal way of learning to use Linux is having a friend nearby to ask questions to. You can't find a better knowledge base than a user community.
Last point: applications should not tend to emulate Windows counterparts, but go for quality and second ease to use.

Check out NEdit. It's an open-source, highly customizable editor with the best mouse integration of any editor anywhere. Control-drag to make rectangular selections that can be dragged anywhere in the document. It has programmable smart indent for placing lines in the proper column. It doesn't highlight expressions when brackets are missing, but it automatically highlights matching brackets, so if one is missing it's pretty easy to tell. All this and it takes up a lot less memory than XEmacs. Run it in client/server mode and you'll only have one NEdit process in memory for all of your documents.

The only downside is that it's not available for Windows and I've become spoiled for all other editors.

-DA

Amen to that. Nedit absolutely rules as an editor, and it's pretty easy for people used to GUIs to learn. The only real hangup I can see is that the GUI layer in Nedit is Motif/Lesstif built. That could complicate embeedding it in Kdevelop. Nevertheless the editor guts with autoindent, bracket matching, etc are still there. Here's the Nedit homepage: www.nedit.org

This was announced last week and, not wishing to be smug, but I submitted almost exactly this story the day it was released. Rejected VERY quickly.

Sounds familiar; I'm waiting for the somebody else's version of the story that NEdit has been released under the GPL to appear as news here. I mean, a quick straw poll: how many people care about the source code to an Amiga program being GPL'd compared to that of a slick, emacs-thrashing programmer's editor? It's not that I think that any source code liberation isn't worthy of note, but a sense of priority would be nice on an essentially Linux-biased site such as this.

KDE & Gnome are slow (at least for now), whatever you people say. Gnome is helped a bit by not using E (some people say that sawmill is better). About KDE: i simply find the user interface too cluttered and confusing.

Some apps i use:

• Netscape for WWW browsing
• NEdit for text editing
• gentoo as a file manager