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You've installed the development tools, right? If not they're in your Applications folder tucked away in something like Installers (I moved mine off to an external drive but they're in there somewhere).

So, grab the sources but make sure you get the extras as well. Put both in a temp directory, unzip the sources, then the extras, and then do something like

./configure --disable-gtktest --enable-gui=carbon --enable-gtk2-check=no --enable-motif-check=no --enable-athena-check=no --enable-nextaw-check=no --disable-gpm --with-mac-arch=ppc

I'm stuck in the dark (frugal?) ages with one of those old style G4 PowerBooks so ppc makes sense for me.

Look into the Autofold script.

It only supports a few languages so far but its fairly easy to extend and the developer will work with you.

Direct link: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=92 5

...does Vim do all the stuff jEdit can do?

in a word, yes.

more specifically, Vim can do everything Emacs can do, and has a lot of features i find every other editor lacking in. there's even an IRC client.

Line Numbering,

:se nu or :set number

Folding,

there are lots of ways to do it. there is also a good deal of built-in support that works with most of what you'd do out-of-the-box. (note: i don't use folding much, but i instead rely on '%' to jump around and '#' or '*' to find definitions.)

Bracket Scope Highlighting

in the standard distribution of Vim in Gentoo, that's on by default. as you type, opposing brackets are highlighted and missing pairs are marked with color. elsewise, you can use '%' to find matching parens, brackets, braces, whatever very quickly.

... What's with search and replace across directories, etc.
Or is it that one is expected to use other CLI tools for that?

personally, i find sed to be more than adequate for the job. if you want integration in your editor, these commands might work:

:argdo %s/foo/bar/
:bufdo %s/foo/bar/
:windo %s/foo/bar/

...although if you want to modify files not already open in the editor, again, sed works just as well and can be run from within vim with :!. of course, being somewhat of a fairly new user to Vim (only been using it for a couple years now), i'm always learning new features.

...does Vim do all the stuff jEdit can do?

in a word, yes.

more specifically, Vim can do everything Emacs can do, and has a lot of features i find every other editor lacking in. there's even an IRC client.

Line Numbering,

:se nu or :set number

Folding,

there are lots of ways to do it. there is also a good deal of built-in support that works with most of what you'd do out-of-the-box. (note: i don't use folding much, but i instead rely on '%' to jump around and '#' or '*' to find definitions.)

Bracket Scope Highlighting

in the standard distribution of Vim in Gentoo, that's on by default. as you type, opposing brackets are highlighted and missing pairs are marked with color. elsewise, you can use '%' to find matching parens, brackets, braces, whatever very quickly.

... What's with search and replace across directories, etc.
Or is it that one is expected to use other CLI tools for that?

personally, i find sed to be more than adequate for the job. if you want integration in your editor, these commands might work:

:argdo %s/foo/bar/
:bufdo %s/foo/bar/
:windo %s/foo/bar/

...although if you want to modify files not already open in the editor, again, sed works just as well and can be run from within vim with :!. of course, being somewhat of a fairly new user to Vim (only been using it for a couple years now), i'm always learning new features.

http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/uganda.html ... while RMS could finish Hurd from his emacs fundraising

Vim now runs on more than 15 different operating systems, so I'm sure emacs can't be far behind.

Cygwin
TXMouse
Virtuawin
gvim
proTeXt

I really wanted to refrain from commenting on this because I believe a large portion of Slashdot regardless of how well read and worldly they believe themselves to be; simply are not. That and the fact i'm aware of my own tedencies to turn a logical, well thought out and reasoned answer into a gun battle. However;

A $100 dollar computer in some of these "3rd world" countries won't even GET to the people that would be able to use them for the purposes of learning and expanding because:

1. Those people are being SLAUGHTERED.
2. Trying to save their families or their own lives.
3. Trying to feed themselves.
4. Finding food.
5. Finding shelter in war settings.
6. Looking for water.
7. Fighting disease.

When you are hungry, thirsty and don't have the hiearchy of needs the Maslow theory claims is universal. You are clearly not going to be interested in someone putting $100 dollars worth of equipment in your hand. It is completely useless to you if it doesn't do any of the above. You're going to maybe want someone to put $100 dollars worth of food in its place. What has the UN and the rest of the "civilized" industrialized world been doing in the last couple of years? Nothing. Absolutely, positively, nothing. Most of the food is consistently taken over by local ganglords, you have 3rd party outsiders destabilizing countries for natural resources, most organizations and even the UN peacekeepers themselves are corrupt. Luring small children with the promises of milk and raping them. It astonishes me you have the gall to sit there and talk about $100 dollar fucking computers with exhuberance as some sort of holy grail.

You, Negroponte and all the other "YEAH YEAH $100 dollars will better educational access idiots" need some reality. Reality in the sense that you need to spend some time in the same countries you think you're doing any favors for. I guarantee you, after spending a couple weeks in one of those places the last thing on your mind is going to be some $100 dollar computer. Infact, on your return I suspect you'd fascinate on something as simple as a bottle of water, ice, the variety of food and such.

Want to help with software and technology? Take an example from a project like Vim and donate money for food, clothes, antibiotics and vaccines. Then pray 10% of the stuff reaches the people that need it.

Please, please, don't mod this insightful; it is not. Not even close.

• Knoppix, live linux boot CD ("rescue"), http://www.knoppix.org/
• Unix Rosetta Stone, table to convert linux vs bsd vs unix, http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
• GNU screen, switch between shells in one login, priceless via ssh, http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
• GNU stow, simple package management for ANY posix system, http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
• vim, not vi (I depend on ^P and a real undo history, note emacs is not so great for sysadmins who need quick changes on dozens of architectures), http://www.vim.org
• sudo, especially when giving a group permission as a non-root user as in my /. post groups + sudo can allow installation rights , http://www.sudo.ws/
• wiki, which tells people how to do things without bugging the sysadmin, (any wiki is good, I use mediawiki), http://www.mediawiki.org/
• CVS/Subversion, note changes in important configuration files (cvs is for older Unixes that can't run svn), http://subversion.tigris.org/
• rdesktop, remotely log into windows Remote Desktop/Terminal Services, http://www.rdesktop.org/
• fail2ban, drop traffic to attacking IPs (ie, failed logins) for small intervals, http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/

Really? Windows has excellent development tools (almost all 3rd party tools run on Windows, and Visual Studio is usually considered one of the best if not the best IDE for development).

*cough* Ok, I'm not going to get into a debate about VS with you. It's been about two yearsa since I used it and it may have changed. But my residual opinion of it is vastly different from yours.

Having said that, I don't think Windows is a good development environment for the very non-scientific, non-quantifiable reason that I feel more productive under OS X. Yes, you can get many of the same tools that come with OS X for Windows, such as GNU Screen, vim, and others.

But like the author of the article in question, I started out with MS operating systems back on DOS 3.0. I used MS OS's for almost 20 years before I switched to OS X, and I was amazed at the cohesiveness of that OS. I get more done because of things both small and large.

• The application menu is always at the top of the screen, so (a) with a glance I can tell what app is foremost and (b) my eyes dont have to jump around to find it
• QuickSilver. An app launcher on steroids. With this the whole "one button mouse" joke becomes irrelevant because my hands don't need to leave the keyboard.
• Alt-Tab vs. Cmd-Tab. On Windows, when you hit Alt-Tab you can only go one way in the list of apps that pop up: left to right. Cmd-Tab is much more robust: Shift-Cmd-Tab takes you to the left, and the arrow keys work as well. You can also quit an app by Cmd-Tabbing to it and hitting Q. i.e. Cmd-Tab-Tab-Q. I use this a lot.
• Terminal.app is just far superior to the command window.
• Spotlight. I have the JavaDocs for my company's entire application setup to be searchable through Spotlight, as well as the J2EE JavaDocs and others. Finding documentation involves the following: Ctrl-Space first few characters of class name. The end.
• PDF integration. I deal with a lot of documentation, and since Word is still the de facto standard they tend to be in Word format. Since that's resource hog when dealing with large documents, I save them as PDFs, something that you can natively do in OS X. Much less troublesome that way, plus then THEY can be searched with Spotlight.

And so forth. None of these things are killers in and of themselves, but taken together they tend to make your development efforts far less time intensive.

Yeah, better install Linux, because god knows MikTeX, emacs, and vim aren't available for Windows...

But I do agree with you. Once you learn LaTeX you will spit on anything like equation editor for the rest of your life. These days I can write math in tex almost as fast as I can by hand.

already slashdotted.

Maybe this will work.

But really, the programs suggested have reasonable alternates that I know of (minus autoCAD, since I haven't used that since college).

Photoshop -- gimp
itunes -- there are multiple, but i'm still content with xmms
flash -- HTML web pages. i'm not the only one browsing with flashblock on, for good reason
dreamweaver -- vi & emacs -- nuf said

There are several replacements for WYSIWYG editors that work several orders of magnitude better.

By the way, Photoshop is good for actual real-life photo editting and manipulations; GIMP works just as well when dealing with almost anything else.

1. Slackware Linux. Still the best after all this time.
2. OpenBSD. Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out there trying to get you.
3. OpenSSH. Because you just can't use plain text telnet anymore.
4. Rsync. Just because.
5. GNU Screen. Triple your terminal productivity. Now with minty-fresh taste!
6. GNU Wget. Because you have better thing to do than watch over a download.
7. Vim.Because Emacs is for losers.
8. Nmap. Look at 'OpenBSD' above.
9. IPTables. Lock that machine down, admin boy.
10. pf. I said, lock that machine down , admin boy!

They forgot one: Vim.

What about just the SDK, as opposed to the Express version (which seems time-limited or something)? I personally develop with GVim for Windows, so the IDEs don't bother me.

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

[...]yet it's too much to expect of yourself to do some of your own legwork and investigation?

The whole point of new sites such as slashdot.org, The Register, The Inquirer, etc... is that they should provide enough info to get you to bother to follow the links through to the real info....

If slashdot announces that a new version of vim on steroids has been released, then it might be interesting to know what exactly vim was. At the very least the FA which the article points to should say what it is all about.

I know I could have simply typed "Ruby on Rails" into google and found out exactly what it was... the whole point is that's exactly what I had to do.

My biggest problem with lisp is that "emacs" seems to be a given. Let's face it, unless you love emacs, it sucks.

Well, I like Lisp (and Scheme) a lot, but I just can't get myself to like emacs. There are a few good ways to use Lisp with other editors. Personally, I'm a vim guy, and although it is nice having an editor that understands what your doing at a deeper level, even emacs doesn't have the kind of environment that is possible with Lisp. The development environment is an area where I think Lisp is currently lacking. (Wasn't always that way, but, alas, the Lisp environments of the LISP Machines of the 1980's are gone). Personally, I think it would be really cool to build a development environment (in Lisp of course, if only because it will make the environment more tightly integrated) that has a vim type mode (and maybe even an emacs mode). Until then you'll just have to settle for either emacs or perhaps VIlisp in vim.

Nah, RMS doesn't give a damn really, he just wrote that along the way when he started his Vim and wanted to work as usual ...

Yes i have the vi vs emacs t-shirt, and not the other way around ...

I'd rather wait for vim 7. :P

Agreed.

I use mutt and vim for email. Other than emacs, it doesn't get more powerful than that.

I think they probably meant easy-to-use.

# fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.

# Firefox * Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.

I'll add a couple of my own:

Vim! Because it's VI, only better!

For those who use gnome, gnome-terminal has tabs! Ctrl-Shift-T and open as many as you want. For some reason it took me a year or two to discover this. I typically have a couple of tabs open, including a root window. It's great for quickly checking logs or for installing software or whathaveyou, and it's much neater than having multiple windows open all over the place.

Then check out either Vim or Emacs. I know Vim has C# and other .Net syntax highlighting scripts readily available, and since Emacs has more programs/functionality than KDE and GNOME combined, I'd assume it does as well.

Microsoft also bundles Notepad with Windows. Are you saying that they should remove it because people are discouraged from downloading a competing editor?

Should I be forced to download my own image manipulation program because MS Paint is anti-competitive?

Should I have to go get a third-party calculator because Calculator discourages competition?

etc., etc., etc.

Ok, Ajax is a bathroom cleaner and Vim is a detergent (in Europe). Can you beat that, Emacs? ;)

I have not tried emacs yet (in fact I did several years ago, but it sticked to vim), but I find the XML plugin for vom quite handy when editing XHTML code. It might not be as mighty as emacs, but it's not as big either :-)

That's why God created VIM

Forgot the link to the article...have included all relevants links in this one.

Linux.com ran a story about web development tools.They approach it as "web development tools for Linux," but most are available for win32 and OS X. I have almost no experience with commercial web development tools (except when trying to tidy up their ugly code). I use content management systems/wikis/etc. where possible (so others can add content & no one need worry about the code or an editor) & a text editor () when not. That being said, Bluefish, Quanta, and Nvu are all nice. All of these options are discussed in the article, as is Screem, which I haven't seen first-hand.

I love the ability to put text and graphics wherever I want

Hrm - sounds like vim would be the ticket. ;-)

All joking aside - my understanding of html/css has shot up through the roof since I ditched Dreamweaver and started coding by hand. Code cleanliness has also improved greatly, as you'd expect. If you've never tried, give yourself a week with a text editor and a good html/css book. It's quite freeing to not have to worry about anything other than the code. No application updates, no program idiosyncracies to deal with, etc.

Allow me to list some of the problems I have with this particular interface feature:

1. Once the options are stabilized, what happens if I let one of my friends use my computer while I'm away? I'm guessing that the interface will be both:
   • hard for my friend to use, and
   • will change in response to my friend's usage patterns, so that when I return, I will have to suffer for another month before it re-learns my usage patterns.
2. What if my usage patterns tend to cause Windows to become unstable, so that I have to wipe the computer and reinstall Windows every few months. Do I have to suffer for a month each time I reinstall Windows?
3. What happens when I upgrade to a new version of Office? Do I have to suffer for another month?
4. It's hard to give someone instructions (tech support) over the phone when the interface changes itself around by default.
5. What about users who learn to use computers by following step-by-step instructions? My experience is that this doesn't help them, because it's nearly impossible to give clear and precise instructions in the first place. Also, these people tend not to use the computer regularly enough for any training algorithm work reliably.
6. I use a lot of different computers. My usage patterns don't follow me, so for n computers, I have to suffer n times the amount I have to suffer on one computer.

Sure, having menus that adapt to a person's usage patterns is a nice idea, but (as is consistent with my experience) Microsoft has done a poor implementation of the idea. This feature, if implemented at all, should:

• not be on by default,
• allow learning and interface updates to be switched on and off separately, and
• have support for importing and exporting interface profiles in some user-editable format

"Old skool fanboys" have different usage patterns than you do. Get over it.

<rant>I find it amazing that so many people repeat the wonderful statements that Microsoft's interfaces are easy to use, but when I actually watch them use them, I see everything but ease-of-use.</rant>

Want an example of what I consider to be a good interface? Have a look at Vim, particularly, GVim (the GUI version of the program). Anyone who knows how to use Notepad can use GVim after learning one additional bit of information: If you don't see "-- INSERT --" at the bottom-left of the screen, press "i" (to switch to "Insert" mode) then just type whatever you want. The rest is obvious to a Notepad user: When you want to load, save, print, quit, or whatever, use the menus. Many advanced features are available by looking through the online help, or asking a friend, but once you learn how to do something in Vim, you know it, and you can practice it until you can do it your sleep, if you like.

But I suppose I'm easily dismissed as an "old skool fanboy" who needs to 'get with the times' instead of using 'archaic text-based UNIX programs' (even though GUI Vim for Windows has been around for several years)... Whatever.

You're in "windows compatible mode" (mswin) ... some of it is nice, some of it is total luser. I usually turn it off, but it means that I don't get "ctrl-v" for paste, I have to remember: "+p ... but once you get used to it it's not that bad! ;^)

--Robert

... don't forget that it's charityware.

Bram is now taking donations to help fund further Vim development. If you donate >10 euro's, you get to vote on new features. This is a great way for those of us who have written countless thousands of lines of code in Vim to show our appreciation.

I just wanted to point out that Intellisense (context-sensitive completion based on parsing or "understanding" code) is the #1 most voted VIM feature. You should add your own votes (with your hard-earned cash, if you will) if you want to see this feature come to VIM.

I personally do want this feature. It would make VIM the perfect text editor, IMO. Right now, VIM's completion is already pretty good, and a couple people have implemented completion as a plugin, but it usually ends up being a hack. I think Bram can figure out a nice way to do it for Vim 7.

People who know how to use VIM well find themselves really productive in it. But, that said, I end up being slightly more productive writing Java code in Eclipse, ONLY because of completion, even though all my other editing features from VIM aren't there (or are buried).

What I usually end up doing is keeping a console handy and switching between Eclipse and VIM when I have to do Java, but that's not that nice. I think Vim can pull this off.

http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php

In good sadness, though, I'm looking forward to the spell-checking in Vim 7.

good memory, expandable viSD

I use vim with a combination of the Viki plugin and GPG. Not too tough. Just make sure you've got the modeline set in your encrypted file: # vim: nobackup nowritebackup noswapfile bufhidden=wipe

Then a few auto commands in your .vimrc and you're good to go. I just press enter on my password file.gpg link and hit enter, vim takes care of allowing gpg to prompt for my passphrase and everything.

I use vim with a combination of the Viki plugin and GPG. Not too tough. Just make sure you've got the modeline set in your encrypted file: # vim: nobackup nowritebackup noswapfile bufhidden=wipe

Then a few auto commands in your .vimrc and you're good to go. I just press enter on my password file.gpg link and hit enter, vim takes care of allowing gpg to prompt for my passphrase and everything.

I also can't imagine that any of the clicks the advertisers get are legit. It's probably mostly accidental clicks as people are navigating around.

Of course, the best thing would be to encourage people to make their sites a little more user-friendly with more than a few words of text on each page. But barring that, some form of ad blocker that finds and kills these things would be a good idea. Maybe someone can write one for Firefox and Internet Explorer?

Using my superior pattern recognition skills I've deduced that a iPod Pico will be forthcomming.

Apple has already bypassed the arcanely licensed pico by releasing the more modern and free nano. As you know, several years ago Apple introduced emacs. It is clear Apple's next product will be vi based.

P.S. I really enjoy thinking of Python users eating shit on their compiles withe parser trying to determine what mystical combination of spaces and tabs results in an indentation.

Err. Why not just point him to http://www.vim.org/ ?

matchit.zip : extended % matching for HTML, LaTeX, and many other languages

Since most of my programming is in C++ and Intel Assembly language, I can't help the "professional sofware engineer" who posed the question. I imagine if I were an XML "programmer" as he indicated (whatever that is!), I'd want something that shows XML tag mismatches. GVIM tries, but I suspect emacs would do a better job.

gvim is the on same platform

See e.g. here
Use tools such as mv(1), mkdir(1) , ln(1) and grep to organize,

Sed - it's there - use it.

Vim refactoring examples in c# If you're a luddite or non programmer, give it a shot.