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My favorite JAVA IDE is still Textpad ... aside from highlighting syntax you're just a couple of shortcut keys away from compiling and running! Plus you can evaluate it for free at http://www.textpad.com/ Try it for a while and you'll see that it's a worthwhile investment.

Kleedrac

That's what I'd say is my biggest reason for not going near Macs.
Aside the speed problems I have noticed on evry Mac I've used (and yea, maybe I'm running a fairly fast PC, and can get it to run cleanly (I had a celeron 300 oc'd to 400Mhz for a few years that ran as well as most of my friends Ghz machines, it was only with games as recent as GTA3 that I had no choice but to upgrade if I wanted to play)) but the UI for all the Mac programs seriously puts me off.
Programs like BBEdit, just do not compare to Textpad which has all the options I want, and listen to most of the options it's users would like. It's front end is simple, and clean, and nice, whereas the UI for every Mac program I have ever used, just feels clunky, slow and nasty. Almost plasticy, just like XP (though OK, not nearly as painful).

I agree that in OSX is by far the best Mac OS yet, but I still feel, personally, that the Mac has too many letdowns for me to use seriously.
I have approached using a G4 for music purposes, or graphic design, but at every turn I have found a way to use a PC to do the same, faster and better, and that allows me to stick with a system that runs faster and more like the way I want.

I think most of us did get that that was the point. Many of the posts are questioning whether it's really true. The Google example has proven to be quite a distraction for those that believe that Eric Schmidt is stating a truth that will invariably come to pass. I don't think he is lying, but he is definitely saying something that usually goes with disclaimers along the lines of

This statement contains forward-looking statements regarding financial and contractual commitments that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of third parties, the sustained performance of current and futures products, financing risks, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology solution involving multiple providers and users, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on From 10-K and Form 10-Q.(boilerplate disclaimer from sgi.com)

In other words, if he gets a good deal on Itaniums or Athlon64s, or if Google decides to keep huge parts of their databases in-memory and therefore could use the larger address space, or if they have to compete head-to-head with someone who only uses 64-bit CPUs, or whatever other reason, they will start buying them immediately.

What has changed is that business no longer has a need to buy the latest and greatest it has to offer, because the uptake of technology has reached the point of diminishing returns. This means that business no longer cares for the most powerful hardware, it no longer gives them a competitive edge in their industry.

Again, only if you believe it. I don't know about you, but my employer (a well-known biotech frim) sucks in as much processing power as it can reasonably get a hold of. Our needs are getting bigger by the day. I am writing this on a dual-CPU Dell desktop with 1 Gb of RAM, and I often am frustrated that I can't load XML files larger than a mere 30 or 40 Mb into memory, or that my 900 Mb log files slow everything to a crawl when I load them into Textpad. My kids play games that are just not as fun unless you have one or more 1.5+ MHz CPUs and at least a GEForce3.

Michael S. Malone's article in Red Herring was just that, a red herring.

No, in this case, Office is the wrong tool for the job. The guy needs a screwdriver, and he (or his company) bought a full service pneumatic, variable spped drill complete with 57 screwdriver attachments. I don't need all that shit either, but I don't use Office, either. I use Textpad for word processing. Period. That's the right rool for what I do.

Try out TextPad. About the same as your homesite, only better :-)
It can offer you the same 'insert some html tag here' functionality. Or you can just use it as a texteditor with replace function &nd line numbers, which is the best use, I think.

I use textpad, their site.
I'd have to agree that Dreamweaver (MX or not, doesn't really matter) is the best WYSIWYG editor available, but still, give me an editor with linenumbers and I'm happy (I used notepad for a while, btu was missing the linenumbers :-))

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

I don't even use an office suite of any kind. And word processing is done on Textpad or Wordpad.

I'd need CD burning software, and a kick ass POS system that is EASY to use (ie: big pretty buttons) that supports a Hand Held Products barcode scanner, a Star TSP 600 thermal printer, a cash drawer, and a credit card swipe (don't know manufacturer). It also has to integrate in credit card processing with my merchant bank. It also has to swap data with Quickbooks. I didn't find anything even close when I was investigating.

Wow, wrong again! I compile things with the command line, and write all my source code in Textpad or, if I'm using UNIX, vi! But, once again, it's because I like Windows XP that I suddenly know nothing.

You "old-school" programmers are ridiculous; you think that you're the only ones that know how to do things, your way is the only way, and you're bitter that they've made things easier since you started.

All your superior attitude does is convey how out of touch you are with the way things REALLY are. Go get some aspercreme, take care of that carpal tunnel, and start engaging your brain before you open your mouth.

In general I prefer Linux, but Microsoft still does some things better.

Can someone tell me why font rendering looks better on Windows? Am I doing something wrong? Fonts on linux look all blocky and sometimes hard to read, especially in Mozilla and Emacs.

Also, I still find that running graphical programs is laggy on Linux compared to Windows on the same computer. I think GNOME itself may be hogging too many resources. (I havn't used KDE enough to make a comparison).

Windows Explorer beats any of the graphical file browsers I have seen packaged with all the distros I've tried. Of course with Linux you don't need a graphical file browser, but sometimes its nice.

Plus there are still some applications that I have to use on Windows. Gimp may be evolving, but Photoshop still kicks its butt. OpenOffice works, but incorectly reformats word documents I have to share with "Windows only" co-workers. I also am a die hard fan of Textpad and they don't make a Linux version
?

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).

you might want to try ultraedit. not free, but supposedly well worth the price.

A friend of mine suggested that, but I found it too "clunky" to use (and kind of slow). For now, I've settled on TextPad as a decent enough replacement. I can dream though.... =)

I'm like jedit a lot. I have used textpad and like it. However, lately I am using all diiferent kinds of systems. I have a PC at work, I go home and use my Mac (bbedit formerly) and a debian linux box and I've come to use jedit on all of them.

It's not quite as bad switching around if you work on two platforms, but even then, having the same interface and features across the board is awesome.

It works great with CVS and ANT too!

Mentioned twice before but I figured I'd add my bit:

1. Regular expression "replace" - very useful

2. opens (very) large files quickly

3. I actually paid the shareware fee - for those that know me that should say something...

4. Hex mode

Also, not a text editor but a very usefull addition to your toolset is "EasyDiff" and "EasyDiff Pro", which is a powerhouse of text and file system comparisons.

CySurflex

http://www.textpad.com. Cheap, powerful, fast, & very stable.

I love this editor.

Adds itself to the context menu in explorer so you can open anything in it.
Supports huge files.
Color codes C++, Java, etc.
Handles indenting and word-wrap well.
Has an 'always on top' feature.
Easy to asign file associations from the UI.

http://www.textpad.com

Textpad is what our firm uses... syntax highlighting, line numbers, multiple documents w/selection tabs, block select, the list goes on and on...

And no, I have no financial interest in them...

I've worked with several good IDEs, and plenty of mediocre ones. Most of them have already been mentioned on here, so I won't bother. But I have noticed that the "best" IDE generally depends on your preferred language and environment. Things like runtime debugging or source control integration can really make a big difference. For example, I've used Visual Cafe at my last two jobs, not because I particularly like it, but because it integrates with Weblogic.

That said, I find I often need more than one editor, even if only one is really an IDE. So I suggest taking a look at a program called Textpad. It's essentially just a text editor, but it has a ton of features, and it's extensible. I like to use it for xml and html (good syntax highlighting), even while I use my other IDE for java. It's pretty inexpensive, and you can download a fully functional free trial (nagware - works indefinitely). The website is www.textpad.com.

The downside is that, unfortunately, it is only available for windows. :(

Same here, but with Textpad. They give you a fully functional app, but every random number of saves it pops up to say "hey, give us some cash". I use it every day at work so I had no problem sending them a check. Beats the hell outta spending $2000+ for an IDE with features I'll never use.

I'd love to see Textpad come with win*. It's free as in annoyware (popup every 5th save?) though it's only $30 to register (to support more plugins).

You can get plugins to do syntax highlighting for pretty much anything immaginable. Reads/saves pc or unix, built in spellchecker, nice and light. What wordpad would be if you actually had to use it.

I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio.

Gosh. Better dust up the old resume. Any company that won't fork over the cash to get you a development environment that you want might soon decide not to fork over the cash to pay your salary. As one other person recommended, you might want to plunk down the cash to get your own license -- it might not be worth the trouble trying to learn a whole new way of doing things if it's going to make you less productive. Plus, you can take it with you elsewhere, and it might even be tax deductible.

That said, RHIDE & DJGPP is available. Textpad has all sorts of nice IDE editor thingies and a way to compile java programs (not freeware, though). I've heard lukewarm reviews of LCC -- questionable quality of compiled code, at least at the time of my research.

I seriously wonder what people (the nine states included) would do if MS stripped Windows down until it was just the OS itself. Bye-bye, calc,

Google search lists dozens of freeware calculators, many of them promoted as 'Windows Calculator Replacements'.

notepad,

http://www.textpad.com Not freeware, but damn close to being worth the money. There are dozens of freeware 'Notetab Replacements' out there.

wordpad,

http://www.openoffice.org/

solitaire,

http://www.fdepot.com/sol.asp

ftp, telnet,

Both blatantly ripped BSD code. The original BSD code is in active use and can be ported to Win32 or compiled for use with Cygwin

minesweeper,

http://freewarejava.com/applets/games.shtml

icons, windows, menus...

It's arguable that these are part of the operating system, just like the windowing systems on Linux are part of a 'usuable' Linux Distro. That said...

There are many Windows UI and File Manager interface replacement projects, many of which are open source.

If MS distributed just a kernel, a process scheduler, IO and Memory managers, You could have a 'usuable' Windows distro made entirely of freeware or Open Source software.

Then all we need is Textpad for Linux and then all well be well in the land of CS coding...

I am not sure of how useful this would be for all windows, but Textpad has had this functionality for a while now.

When using one of the search(&replace) tools, when the dialog box loses focus, the box becomes partially transparent, so that you can read the text behind it. Then when focus returns to the dialog box, it becomes opaque again. This is pretty useful, as previously I would end up dragging the box around the screen trying to find the text hiding under it.

John

Personaly I have used a few (Visual Cafe, JBuilder, J++, plus an array of text editors) I have found that the best one that I've tried is JCreator Pro from It has a really nice GUI that sort of remindes me of VC++, it integrates with any version of JDK and provides help straight out of that documentation. The debugger isnt the best, it is just jdb in a section of the JCreator window. It has realy good auto compleetand overall it is a great tool.
I'm waiting to see what this eclipse project is like, I would really like to add features in to most IDE so an open source plugable one sounds good especially since it can be used for more than just java. alphaWorks has released a c/c++ plugin for it.
If you are after a really good text editor though you should go no further than TextPad it is the best text editor I've ever used. Good syntax highlighting with hundreds of extra syntax definitions avaliable from their web site. You can also compile and run java from within text pad. Before I found JCreator this is the only thing I'd use. I prefered Text pad over Visual cafe and the other IDEs ive used. What ever IDE you deside on I'd sugest you get JCreator anyway.

I love my TextPad 4.5 - but the first thing I have to do is reset the search commands to the Microsoft Windows standard CTRL-F/F3 combo.

Just go to Configure->Preferences, click editor, and select "Microsoft Applications" under Keystroke Compatibility.

TextPad comes with the ability to run command line tools (such as java and javac) on the current file, and also does syntax highlighting for Java, HTML, and about 50 other languages.

Check it out at www.textpad.com

I use BBEdit Lite and Project Builder on my Mac OS X machine for Java work.

I use Textpad. No debugger, but that's what System.out is for, right? Fully configurable syntax highlighting for every Java, JSP and every other language you could ever think of, and then some. Integrated compiler, and extensible tools. It's cheap ($30 I think). I use WinCVS, of cvs integration. I've tried Visual Slickedit, and it was too slow for me and I didn't need it's additional functionality. My company decided both of the Java programmer were going to use Visual Age for Java and spent $2500 on two licenses. I struggled with it for two weeks... It's a buggy, bloated piece of crap.

On Windows, its all about textpad. Open up the api documentation in a browser- what more do you need? You can compile and run directly from Textpad.

Well, you've got to look at what people want. Does average Joe User care that Office is going to load an extra quarter second faster on the new hardware, or would he rather see more pretty graphics. Definately the latter. But really, if you strip down W2K, and run it as a desktop, it IS incredibly fast when you're not running bloatware (ie: Office). But for the average user, the current speed of most big apps on current hardware is fine for them. They want more bells and whistles. Case in point. My text editor that I live with is TextPad. It hasn't changed much in the past few years, and when I run that on newer hardware on W2K, it absolutely screams. It's all in how you use it.

That's all

Sure, the future holds lots of computing-specific appliances. Put a chip in your TV, your Calculator, and your Toaster for doing all sorts of computation. But how are you going to write software for each of these "appliance-computers"? You need some sort of system that can act like a TV, a calculator, and at least have network access to the toaster. You need a text editor and the option of simulating or stepping through code. The very act of software development cannot be done on your Mr. Coffee.

Consider this... I've spent several months programming a Quake 3 Mod using TextPad and the base Q3 code from Id Software. I can't imagine doing the development on a specialized computer appliance. Even if I had a machine that only played games (eg. a PS2), I'd still need access to the general purpose computer to develop the mod. And making your PS2 or Dreamcast boot linux doesn't count-- that's making the specific system more general. The fact is that we'll always need a more general computer for the purpose of developing specific computers.

Of course, the average person will use far more specialized computer. But I'm happy as long as I have my PC.

-Ted

It has syntax highlighting for just about every language available, as well as the ability to create your own, by writing a .syn file.

TextPad has actually become my text editor of choice. I use it for everything from writing/compiling Java to viewing log files. There is a free trial version (full version costs $27, I think) at the TextPad Site.

PS - Windows only, methinks.

I was in the same position as you. At the time (6-9 months ago) I emailed the authors of UltraEdit and TextPad to ask about porting to linux. Both of them said that it is a possibility they are considering. However nothing's happened yet.

I've tried Nedit several times in the last two years and every time I end up with a bug where the Ctrl-?? hotkeys cease to function and start dropping odd xml type tags into the document. It does this intermittently but always eventually. Killed it for me.

Now I use xemacs - I just wish it would colour highlight more languages (jsp, xml, xslt in particular).

Seconded: Textpad rocks.
--
Cheers

• The documentation I'm writing (other than POD in the Perl modules) is being done with the DocBook DTD, which lets me write in one common format and publish in HTML, Word doc format, etc... all from one document.
  
• Content classes may be created using a hybrid Perl/XML format which defines the class' properties, methods, template accessors, and various other aspects.
  
• Objects in my system may be imported and exported in a simple, self describing XML format listing all of their properties. You can write it by hand easily in Textpad or Emacs to make lots of objects easily...
  
• XML is used to syndicate news and headlines from other sites, like the service Slashdot offers in the backend. I've written content classes in Iaijutsu which download these syndication files to collect headlines. And, I believe, Slashdot uses these files to make slashboxes.
  

Looking at any non-trivial XSL stylesheets, you can see what a generally bad idea it is. My advice would be to use a real programming language with DOM bindings.

I wouldn't write off XSL on the strength of that article at xml.com...

When I first looked at XSL some months ago, I thought that it would be a messy and difficult language. I was wrong. XSL, IMHO, is the right solution for translating XML into pretty much anything. Yes, it does have a steep initial learning curve (much like our favourite OS :-) but once that is out of the way, you understand why the language is so useful. Why does it look so unwieldy? Because it's a "dialect" of XML. (Which I think is a good thing - it shows how flexible XML is) Typical XSL is as simple as saying "if you encounter this XML element, do this with it." Editing XSL text is really quite easy with the correct syntax highlighting. (TextPad is a good editor under windows)

As for non-trivial XSL stylesheets? On our project, we have written XSL to transform our XML data into binary outputs. The stylesheets used ran into tens of thousands of lines! I think that qualifies for non-trivial in anyone's book. I admit that the XSL is difficult to read, but show me any source that is easy to read when >10k lines...

XSL as a complete solution? No. Even in a relatively simple XML to HTML documentation tool I wrote, I called the XSL from a JavaScript app that handled things like file access and other helper functions. This was under Win2k, using the built in script engine to call the XSL via COM. (yes, even MS get's things right sometimes) The point is that XSL is better for tranforming XML than trying to use a DOM-manipulating language binding...

On another note, why does everyone assume that XML is solely for exchanging data on the web/net? I've used it for documentation, log files, test cases, application persistence and application exchange formats. It's a lot more useful and flexible than people think.

You: You can simply resize the main Opera window and then re adjust the smaller web page windows inside the main window, or even maximize the web page you're most interested in.

That's fine until you open another window without the windows taskbar (OK, I'm being operating specific and pedantic here) knowing about it. This means that to switch between pages, I have to use the internal page switching mechanism of the software rather than the familiar ALT-TAB or start-bar click.

Yes, CTRL-TAB works fine for switching between them, and after a while it would become a habit if Opera was all that I used. It's switching habits between different programs on the same operating systemthat's the problem. Opera is not following the "usual" behaviour of programs in this environment (Windows).

I have the same problem with Textpad (which I love using, it's a breeze to use). Textpad at least provides an visual tab system which allows quick switching of documents as well as CTRL-TAB, but I still have to think, after first scanning the ALT-TAB list or the task bar for that other document I know I have open.

Sub-windows and CTRL-TAB for switching are an established part of the user interface too, but one that is used for switching between things in the same context. I consider two different web sessions to be different enough contexts to require greater separation.

I also frequently have a layout something like this (ascii art alert):

+-------------------------------+
|+----------------+ |
||browser1 ||
|| |--+ |
|| |||
|| |----+|
|| |||
|+----------------+ ||
||x| ||
| +---|browser2 ||
| +---------------+|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Where x might be a telnet session or a text editor where I'm copying and pasting bits and pieces, or even working on HTML which I'm then viewing in the browsers. With Opera, this is impossible.

Enough rantage though. What it boils down to is that I find applications with thier own backing space to be vastly annoying. They don't need to own the screen real-estate outside their own windows. I actually prefer the Mac's model (apart from allowing an application to be open without needing a window to be operational or a big backing thingamy) over Windows.

You: It looks to me like you're really looking for something negative to say.. especially with [statement about how download manager has been done before]

I think that download manager is a nifty thing, I was just pointing out that it's not a big factor in the decision I make when it comes time to pick a browser for today's slashdot read. The big ugly buttons at the top of Opera, the whole "double document" look and the smaller viewable area on my already crowded laptop screen are the big factors.

Random back on topic. Mozilla won't have these problems. Yay.

Nobody that I know lives in Notepad. You just register a copy of Textpad and tell it to take over all of Notepad's extensions.

It's a fine text editor for Windows. I first found out about it because Sun was bundling a shareware copy of it on their Java Developer's Companion CD.

InterDev promptly screws up the style sheet (drops a trailing squiggly bracket)

Would I get flamed if I said "Raise a bug with Microsoft"?

In all seriousness, post screenshots of the source in the IDE and another different text editor (I'd recommend TextPad) to a web site and mail me / post the url. I'm using InterDev at the moment, and this would be useful ammunition in my quest for DreamWeaver...

Cheers