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A few weeks ago I used sed to search and replace some words in almost one million files. It took about 40 minutes to do a search and replace on that many files. I don't even know of a windows tool off hand that would let me do that.

SlickEdit will, for future reference!

I worked on a project several years ago that had a lot of statistical calculations (standard deviation, correlation, distributions, etc.) and was surprised to find that PHP doesn't offer these functions so I had to write my own PHP code to calculate this stuff. I was thinking that implementing an optimized library of various commonly used stats functions would be something that might fit your skill set well. PHP is written in C (and possibly some C++ but I'm not sure). I am re-learning my long lost C chops at the moment in order to contribute to AMFEXT:
http://pecl.php.net/package/amfext

AMFEXT is an extension to PHP and can either be compiled into the PHP executable itself or compiled as a shared object -- a separate file. This extension structure makes it pretty easy to expand PHP because your extension is entirely optional for folks building PHP so it would not be critical to write perfect code right away. In order to get started developing such an extension, there are a variety of tricks to get oriented.

One is to read the pecl-dev mailing list:
http://news.php.net/php.pecl.dev

Another is to read some tutorials. This one is pretty good:
http://devzone.zend.com/article/1021

Here's a quick start guide describing how to make your own 'hello world' extension:
http://blog.slickedit.com/2007/09/creating-a-php-5-extension-with-visual-c-2005/

You don't need permission to download the source and compile it yourself and start building your own extension. If you want it to be included in the PECL repository, you just have to join the mailing list and submit your extension for the other contributors to see. They'll let you know what further steps to take.

I could also use some help with my open source project:
http://flashmog.net/

Great piece of software. But yes, quite expensive cake. http://www.slickedit.com/

You aren't kidding. $300 for a code editor? What features could this thing have that could possibly be worth that much money?! I read some of the "cool features" like: code navigation, syntax completion, and auto-completions. There are lots of IDEs and editors that are free that have these very same features, so I am at a loss as to why anyone would choose to spend hundreds of dollars for this.

Buy a copy of Visual Slick Edit for Linux.

Great piece of software. But yes, quite expensive cake. http://www.slickedit.com/

Slickedit

Some people tend to get religious when it comes to text editors (emacs. vs. vi, etc), so I'll just say this: TextMate is still young (it's v 1.5.5 for now), but already good enough to be honored in "editor hall of fame". And I have used enough number of editors for past 20 years including alpha, brief, vim, bbedit, visual studio, codewarrior, ultraedit, slickedit....

But on Windows, there's nothing I've found close enough to it.

Of course there is, it's called Visual SlickEdit.

It will set you back north of $250 for a single-user license, but then if you're a developer it will probably pay for itself inside of three months.

"Also note the amazing lack of Open Source products on that list"

Maybe SlickEdit is what you are looking for... Their "Mac" version requires X11 though.

If you want something anywhere close to VS 2005, try the demo of SlickEdit. I don't know of any other IDE in Linux that's better, especially for C/C++ coding. I never used it a lot personally, but a coworker of mine uses it everyday and it does seem to be a pretty efficient and capable IDE.

I use Visual SlickEdit 10 for Linux. http://www.slickedit.com/ This piece of software is the most configurable IDE I've ever used;

I'll second that.. I use slickedit to work on the various perl/php scripts that I maintain. As such, I can't say much about the compiler, but the intergration with cvs is nice. :)

it's a tad on the expensive side, but everything just works and it was worth it for me.

If you can provide a student ID, you get it for a fraction of the cost. Then just pay the yearly maintenance to keep the software up to date.. Worked out great for me.. :) I've been using it for about 4 years now..

Borland's Delphi (Windows) and Kylix (Linux) is superior to Visual Studio/Visual C++ in most repects. They are full RAD systems with drag-and-drop interface builders and come with excellent compilers for both Object Pascal and C++. There are a large number of third-party component packages available for them. There is a free version of Kylix although they hide it pretty well on their web site. It is called "Open Edition" and you can get it here: http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download _kylix.html. Visual Slickedit is a very sophisticated text editor which turns any set of command line tools into a graphic IDE. It does not have an visual interface builder, however. Available for both Windows and Linux but no free version. It is well worth the price if you are programming at the professional level. http://www.slickedit.com/ Mike

Visual Slickedit is the best by far but you have to pay for it. I have used the Windows version professionally for decades and bought the Linux version when I got my first contract job using Linux. If you are doing serious programming, it is unbeatable. It is complicated enough to require some study to master it. It can be configured to work as a front-end for any command-line tools and the Linux version comes set up for all of the usual ones. It analyses program structure, parses compiler error messages and references them to the source text, etc. It does an excellent job of organizing large projects involving hundreds of files and many modules. http://www.slickedit.com/ Mike

I use Visual SlickEdit 10 for Linux. http://www.slickedit.com/ This piece of software is the most configurable IDE I've ever used; it's a tad on the expensive side, but everything just works and it was worth it for me.

If You think those are good, I recommend you try: Visual Slickedit

Perhaps the best editor I've ever come across.
It has features like, Contexts - where you get to see declarations and implementations of function and types you're using in a "preview window", like the lower pane of many popular mail readers (where they show you an email preview.
You can also easily jump to declarations, AND it automatically keeps tracks of your jumps, so that you can always "jump back".
It's completely scriptable and extremely customizable.
It's like coding reinvented, I highly recommend.

Oh, and btw, it's cross platform. (There's a windows version and a linux version, perhaps even other OS's which i didn't bother checking)

Until Linux gets an IDE at least 75% as good as MSDev
methinks you want this

If you're doing any J2EE work, I highly recommend Eclipse with the myEclipse plugin. It carries a price tag of about $30 per year, but this is much cheaper than many of the other equivalent IDEs. Included are a JSP developer, XML editor, SQL Editor, database explorer, EJB modeler and JSTL support among many other features. It is a great tool.

If J2EE isn't of any concern, I still first recommend Eclipse because of its nice integration with CVS, JUnit and other Java tools. There are also plugins for C and C++. And best of all, it's free. Even if Eclipse weren't free, I'd still pay for it. It's the best IDE I know.

The only other IDE I'd recommend is SlickEdit. I used it for a number of years for C/C++ and Java before switching to Eclipse. It's a good editor, but I found that I could do my job better with Eclipse. Many of my co-workers use SlickEdit instead and rave about it. It all depends on what you need to do and how you work. There's now a plugin so you can use the SlickEdit code editor in Eclipse. However, Visual SlickEdit comes with a price tag in the $200 - $300 range and the plugin is a about $150 or so.

The development tools under windows blow everything else out of the water.

Try Visual Slickedit, one of the best IDEs I've ever seen. Kinda expensive, but worth it. Try the trial version if you don't believe me.

It has native support for (not just color coding!):

Ada, dBASE, JSP, Slick-C, Ant, Delphi Pascal, Lex, Tcl, ANTLR, DTD, Pascal, Transact SQL, C, Fortran, Perl, VHDL, C++, High Level Assembler, PHP, Visual Basic .NET, C#, HTML, PL/SQL, VB Script, CFScript, IDL, PowerNP Assembler, Verilog, Ch, InstallScript, PVWave, x86 Assembly, CICS, Java, Python, XML, COBOL, JavaScript, REXX, XSD, DB2, JCL, SAS, YACC

And syntax highlighting for more.

Documentation for version 9 can be ordered here.

Slickedit used to include the printed manual up to version 6 of their boxed product; from version 7 on it has been an optional, extra-cost item.

Quality of documentation is variable: the manual tries to cover all the features, as well as the extension language & API, but much experimentation is necessary to really understand how the more obscure features work, often not mentined in the manual but only the (usually detailed) new features list in the Readme file.

... if you read the description of the features that they've added, it isn't as impressive (to me, at least) as you would believe from the magic moniker "refactoring". They merely provide automation to refactoring tasks you could do by hand but which are more time consuming.

The comparison with a compiler is specious. Perhaps a better comparison would be to a macro assembler. But even then, the fact is the editor is not doing anything more than the body sitting on the other side of the keyboard.

What would be interesting, and what wasn't clear from the marketing noise on the site, is whether the editor is performing semantic analysis of the code to deal with aliasing and other issues that crop up when refactoring by hand.

This is not to say these functions aren't useful: they are. But they don't just spin through your code and rewrite it for you. You need to know what you're doing.

1. 4NT - I am old enough to use the command line.
2. Visual Slickedit - my editor of choice. I started out with version 4 and I just sent off the money for the upgrade to version 9 yesterday.
3. Subversion - 'cause VCS is a must. The place where I work may not use it but I will.
4. Tortoise SVN - to make my life with a VCS even more easy.
5. Cygwin - mostly for GCC.
6. Linkstash - I think this is a much better way to manage bookmarks
7. Winzip - the latest version. And yes, I've paid for it.
8. Object Desktop - I've gotten addicted to Object Bar and Object Edit. No, I'm not into skinning...
9. OE-QuoteFix - makes Outlook Express a bearable newsreader.
10. ev41 - a free HP-41 emulation for when I need a real calculator. There is a Pocket PC version too.

the editor in Eclipse 2.0 is among the best I have ever used

I agree that the editor in Eclipse 2.x is much improved, and is quite good, but it's tough to beat the Visual Slickedit Plug-In for WSAD/Eclipse (No, I don't work for them, just a happy user).

Or if you are 133t you can just use vim

yeah, totally!

Many suggested SlickEdit, but they missed an important feature: SlickEdit have a VI emulation mode!

I just think it's better. :) http://www.slickedit.com/home.php

As an added bonus you can tell yourself you are using a descendent of the very editor that was used by the actual developers of the early versions of NT!

- adam

• Superb source code browser. The main reason why I bought Slickedit.
• Runs on most OS'es including Linux and OS/390(!).
• C-like macro-language
• The people at Slickedit are very responsive if you're having trouble. This includes support as well as sales.

• It costs money. A single user license is $299 in USA and Canada, $329 everywhere else.
• No Mac version.

Have a look at Visual SlickEdit - www.slickedit.com. Works great with Development projects in Java, Perl, C, HTML... on and on.

I'm also assuming they don't need to know how to set up and install a system, just be a user. They should know how to configure their own environments, set environment variables, etc. System stuff should be limited to the software they might be using and managing -- where are the logs and conf files, how to install, and so forth.

Free alternatives to costly software is a great idea. What about a brief discussion of Apache, JavaServer/JSP, Xerces, Xalan, etc? No need to get into the nitty gritty, but let them know there are free, multiplatorm alternatives to everything. My alternative to Visual Studio is Visual SlickEdit.

Although this seems like a convoluted feature, it's extremely useful for doing any kind of refactoring work where you want immediate feedback analysis. You get to see immediately where everything is used, and it's got other tools which help with that as well (like the class browser and the like). (It also has Visual Basic-style autocomplete, which I absolutely love, because on large projects I never remember exactly what everything's named).

Admittedly, you might not want to change editors just for this feature, but you might want to have it in your arsenal of tools for when you do need/want it.

VisualSlickEdit. While not technically an IDE, it's trivial to wire in external tools such as ant.

I also use TogetherControlCenter, but once I move from design to coding that environment is too slow, cumbersome, and resource intensive.

SlickEdit/ant is especially nice when deploying EJBs. TogetherCC and VisualCafe take a couple of minutes to deploy an EJB jar. ant does it in 5 seconds.

I use an editor and an IDE. The editor I use is Visual SlickEdit. It is light, fast, and runs on every platform I've ever heard of. I also use an IDE that can generate code and manage J2EE archives. The IDE I use is the SilverStream eXtend Workbench. (I would note that I am a little biased since I was one of the people who wrote this IDE).

Slickedit, hands down the best balance between Notepad and a full fledged IDE I've seen. Think emacs, but with a better GUI and without all the extra crap and ridiculous key combos.

I've cranked out many lines of Java code with it, so it's lasted the long haul for me.

By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level.

Visual Slickedit has this and many more features and is availble for almost all UNIXes. Trial versions are available.

Slickedit is expensive ($299), and closed source, and most of its (and other editors) features can be reproduced in vi and emacs, but I like it. Especially the feature you mention.

Incidentally the latest issue of Linux Journal has a review of Visual Slickedit.

By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level.

Visual Slickedit has this and many more features and is availble for almost all UNIXes. Trial versions are available.

Slickedit is expensive ($299), and closed source, and most of its (and other editors) features can be reproduced in vi and emacs, but I like it. Especially the feature you mention.

Incidentally the latest issue of Linux Journal has a review of Visual Slickedit.

It's a bit pricey, but Visual SlickEdit has BRIEF emulation, and a Linux port.

Aside from the price, it's an excellent all-around programmer's editor.

I'm amazed about how few people know Visual SlickEdit. It is an amazing editor, and yes, it has some BRIEF compatibility. However, that's not it's strong point. It's very cross-platform (well, no Mac version, and the OS/2 version stops at 4.0), but mostly it's extremely powerful and configurable. You just have no idea how awesome this editor is until you've used it a couple weeks.

Unfortunately, it's closed-source and rather expensive. But I wouldn't use anything else.

Try Visual Slickedit. It has a built in macro language (SlickC) and support for loads of languages. Yes, it's not Free software, but I think £200 is about right for a good IDE. It's the only IDE I know of that correctly syntax highlights languages inside HTML.

I like IDEs because they are a labour-saving device. How many ppl here use a machine to wash your clothes? (no, Mum does not count ;-) I don't want to have to update a make file because I changed 2 dozen files out of 2 thousand. I don't want to have remember which files are checked in and out, that information should be visible to me; I want to concentrate on coding.

Yes, there is the argument that hand crafted beats machine tooled, especially in software, but I don't want to spend time updating or fixing builds and headers when I don't have to.

Allow me to put in a third program into the fray: MicroEdge's Visual SlickEdit.

KDevelop looks and works just like (with a less features) just like SlickEdit. It's got syntax highlighting, object viewer, etc, etc. The build frame and browse frame are in the same locations as KDevelop <sarcasm>What a striking resemblence it has!</sarcasm>

Seriously, KDevelop, Visual Studio, and SlickEdit all share the same interface. Who developed it first? Hell if I know, but there must be something to the layout, if three different programs use it.... Anyway, I use SlickEdit at work, and it's the neatest thing on the planet as far as I'm concerned. It's basically a frontend for all your favorite command line tools. Does multiple language syntax highlighting. You can brew your own syntax rules (Great for in-house languages). There's a ton of other feautures I never use.

However, SlickEdit costs $500 bucks a pop. I would never shell out that much (the upgrades are bad too) when you've got nice little KDevelop here that implements all my favorite features and is free to boot. Where I work, the various developers depend on different pieces of SlickEdit, not all of which are implemented in KDevelop or Visual Studio.

I really don't have a point to this, but just to say the visual interface of KDevelop is not exclusive to MS software and that there are professionals that use that *kind* of visual interface (not explicitly KDevelop) in the production environment.

KDevelop ... still found it to be miles ahead of any other Linux IDE

I guess you meant free IDE. E.g. the commercial Visual Slickedit is far ahead of VC++ and also available for Linux.

http://www.slickedit.com/

I like and use it as well. Can emulate emacs, vi, Brief, CUA, has optional command line, own C-like language for the editor, support a lot of languages, fast, reliable and many-many great features. Functionality is similar to emacs but with MUCH faster learning time. I've tried all of the IDE's for Linux but Visual Slickedit were the most convincing and easy of use. The ONLY BIG problem it doesn't integrate with a debugger (of course you can invoke it, but doesn't follow what you are debugging if you want to edit the source)