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I don't think a GUI platform can call itself complete until it's got an IDE that's worthy for programming.

I disagree... I'm not a fan of your monolithic IDEs at all. My GUI is an IDE:

• ROX-Filer, which is highly customizable and integrated with the shell
• XEmacs or vim as your preference goes, which are two highly advanced programmable editors
• bash, zsh, csh, or your other favorite shell
• autotools for building

These tools combine into an "IDE" that is my desktop. I have the best-in-class for every component. Beats a jack-of-all-trades IDE that lacks in any number of regards and takes huge resources.

Bram Moolenaar for vim and Bram Cohen for BitTorrent.

I'm a developer and I often use Meld, a diff/merge tool. I also am an avid vim user. So every now and then I donate a few bucks to these worthy projects.

EMACS doesn't copy Microsoft, it copies vi. Drop it and switch to a decent editor now.

Yeah, Crimson's great, but I noticed that gVIM can do everything Crimson can except for regular expression searches in files.

...whereas a lot of Windows admins I meet are "Next, OK, Apply, Cancel" kind of guys. Plus Windows is becoming more command line oriented (Thank God!).

I agree, I went from UNIX/LINUX only to woking with Windows servers as well and I must say I'm rather glad of it. Expanding into Windows has made me more employable and having started out in the UNIX world made me a better professional than I would have been if I had taken the Microsoft certification route and then moved into UNIX. Having worked mostly with Win 2003 rather than Win 2000 Server (thank god because the latter really sucks) I am constantly amazed by how the WinOnly admins worship the graphical tools. The first thing I did to my Win 2003 boxen was installing some of the Gnu tools and Gvim (hint: if you really want to have some fun introduce a freshly hatched MCSE to vim). Since then I have written several command line utilities in C#, which is not really all that hard if you know a little Java or C++, just to fill in some of the blanks in the Windows command line toolbox. I can now administrate those Win 2003 boxes completely from the command line which surprises many (though by no means all) Windows admins. The concept of solving time consumig tasks with custom scripts and programs seems to be alien to many Window guys whereas it is commonplace in the UNIX community.

You might not know it but (g)vim can be installed onto windows too.
ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/pc/gvim63.exe

http://www.vim.org/
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/
http://www.nvu.com/
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/

There's a vim script package called allfold that was inspired by the XEDIT all feature, you might find that helpful.

control-[ with Caps lock remapped

However, nothing beats Vim when it comes to editing. All of Emacs' power, with vi's superior keybindings.

Emacs pinky? Never heard of it. The most stretching I have to do is to move my left hand to the escape key every now and then.

So, Vim is space-capable now?

Emacs: Your move.

There exists plugins for using subversion within Vim and subversion within emacs.

We should all use free (though poorly functional) things, rather than things that work.

Were you implying that free software is poorly functional? Geez, every day I use free software that feel is very functional, don't you think?

I'm also a bit confused as how 'free software' = 'freedom'. So... you lose your individual freedom if you buy software?

Free Software means that the users are free to share, study, and improve the software with very little restrictions. You might want to read this; it's best to get it straight from the horse's mouth.

And, people buy Free Software all the time. Why is Red Hat still in business? Free Software has nothing to do with costs; if it costs just as much as proprietary software, I'd still buy the Free Software package if it were superior.

What's so difficult about specifying to the editor through some sort of dialog box that x chunk of text is supposed to be a paragraph, and that y chunk is supposed to be a heading?

If you want my opinion, the reason semantic coding isn't done more often in visual editors is that it doesn't have value to the market that they're being sold to; if you're using Dreamweaver, you don't care about writing easy-to-maintain or clean-looking code--you just want a good-looking web page that people can navigate, and damned if you're going to worry about semantic details on the way.

Note: I do all of my web work in Vim, and do think that XHTML is a pretty neat thing (though it'd be a lot neater if 90% of the web-browsing world supported it); I'm just commenting on the fact that if you're using WYSIWYG editors, you don't worry about the quality of your source, so any effort on the part of said editors to do so is pointless.

Of course, if you use the one true text editor, all you need to know about regular expressions is:

:help pattern

:)

check this out too.

Come on ! Visual C++ has had an IDE for what, twelve years ? and Borland C++ 15 ?

This one is quite good...

Ahhh, the old Borland C/C++ IDEs... i recall programming in BC/C++ 3.2, and the IDE was something i really missed when i moved on. Sometimes you felt like you were running QBasic - the debugger was so well integrated...
TASM was nice aswell.

I have yet to find a text-editor in an IDE that's as full-featured or customizable as Emacs.

One thing you might try is Vim. It's much more configurable than emacs, and much lighter, too.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

maybe i'm blowing smoke out my ass (puff puff) but it seems like you can get 80% of that just by using vim. let's look at the feature list from visual assists website:

• Enhanced Listboxes no
• Suggestion Lists ctrl p and ctrl n in vim will auto complete and cycle through all the similar options. you can set your dictionary to include a syntax file. the whole skinny on that is here
• Enhanced Syntax Coloring i don't know how "advanced" the coloring is... but vim certainly allows you to write some pretty "advanced" syntax files
• Goto well, there's bookmarks in vim. that's similar.
• Underlining of Misspelled Words there's a swell spellchecker for vim here. it "highlights" mispelled words... which may be as good as "underlining".
• Auto Recovery. vim does a fine job of recovering (see here) i don't know how "auto" you need it.

maybe i'm blowing smoke out my ass (puff puff) but it seems like you can get 80% of that just by using vim. let's look at the feature list from visual assists website:

• Enhanced Listboxes no
• Suggestion Lists ctrl p and ctrl n in vim will auto complete and cycle through all the similar options. you can set your dictionary to include a syntax file. the whole skinny on that is here
• Enhanced Syntax Coloring i don't know how "advanced" the coloring is... but vim certainly allows you to write some pretty "advanced" syntax files
• Goto well, there's bookmarks in vim. that's similar.
• Underlining of Misspelled Words there's a swell spellchecker for vim here. it "highlights" mispelled words... which may be as good as "underlining".
• Auto Recovery. vim does a fine job of recovering (see here) i don't know how "auto" you need it.

ha ha ha! or evim!

gvim has a nice interface. The only thing you need to know is to press "i" to turn on insert mode (and if you use "easy mode", you don't even have to do that).

In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:

1. XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
2. CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
3. Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
4. PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
5. Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
6. A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.

And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.

You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.

Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.

Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.

I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.

I notice, though, that noone appears to have have attempted to port vi to winbloze, for which many will remain eternally grateful... :-)

• CKRename - Tool to mass rename files in a folder. Works very well for renaming MP3s.
• WinMerge (Use latest RC under beta builds) - Compare document, script, HTML, etc content versions (compares what has changed from revision to revision).
• XXCopy - Extended version of XCopy. This is a great utility for scripting file backups from one drive to another.
• ISOBuster - Open CD/DVD ISOs, BINs, IMGs, etc without having to burn them. Can extract files without burning as well.
• Vim - Improved version of the vi editor.
• IrfanView - Batch Image Processing and viewer (much like ACDSee, but FREE!).
• Diskeeper Lite - An updated version of the disk defragmenter that comes with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This version does a better job of defragging the drive and shows you more information. The site isn't the manufacturer's, but the download does come directly from them. ExecSoft doesn't have this listed on their site anywhere anymore.
• Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
• xvi32 Hex Editor - Very nice hex editor.
• 7-Zip - A freeware file archiver. It supports all of the popular formats (ZIP, CAP, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB) as well as its own format, 7z.
• Max Lister - Create text lists of files in folders. For example, it's useful for an mp3 list.

Installation / Automation

• InnoSetup - Create your own EXE installers.
• ISTool - A GUI front-end for creating InnoSetup installer scripts.
• WinINSTALL LE 2003 - Create your own MSI installers. Also edit existing MSI installers (change options, add/remove components, etc).
• KiXtart - Advanced batch processing language. Commonly used for logon scripts but can be used to accomplish many tasks (comparable to using VBScript and WELL documented).
• AutoIt - Create scripts to send keys to applictions. Commonly used to "silently" install applictions that don't natively support silent install switches.

Multimedia Tools

Or, perhaps gvim under windows?

With either emacs or gvim, its always good to pick up a copy of LaTeX and bibtex for windows.

• 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,

Making fluxbox and its kin usable winds up requiring I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.

Incredible! Does this mean a base installation of XFce includes Firefox, Abiword, Emacs, GVim, The Gimp, GPhoto, Inkscape and Scribus? These are the apps I require in order to make Fluxbox usable.

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

The question it rasises is how much other stuff is in windows that has IP violations?

I've managed to get out of the IT/Windows side of things and more into embedded development, but, once upon a time...

I do recall that there used to be an admin kit that could be installed with NT 4 (yeah, this goes back a ways) that included a "better" command line interface and some typical tools like vi.

For some now-forgotten reason I "stringed" the vi executable and on the inside it was vim.

Much to my surprise (not) the "About" box listed only MS developers and MS version info -- not a word about the vim project.

So no, it's not the first or only time that MS has "embraced" foreign code without proper attribution.

How to make a torrent from the blizzard downloader using vim:

vim WoW-downloader.exe
/d8:
d:1
:w WoW.torrent

> I thought it was vi vs emacs...Or is that too geeky for /. Or was it resolved that vi was clearly superior?

Admitedly emacs is way better than vi, but vim kicks both arses with a single move! Both emacs and vim are especially good at doing many useless (and some useful) things, but vim does them better and faster!

In my school job, I decided to try a triple monitor setup because there are a lot of CRTs just lying around unused after the acquisition of flat panels. Ultimately I settled on my assigned flat panel and two 17 inch trinitron CRTs.

My main screen has always been the flat panel. At first I tried using one of the extra monitors for my email and IM client, and using the other as a preview window so I could have vim open in fullscreen mode on the flat panel and see my changes in the web browser on the extra monitor. After a few months of usage I'm pretty sure that I would prefer a single widescreen flat panel over my current setup. For one thing, I don't get so many emails and IMs that I can justify having an entire display devoted to it and running all the time. I end up using the preview monitor a lot less now that I have tabbed browsing in Firefox. Also, looking from the flat panel to the CRT is sort of a painful transition because of the differences in sharpness, brightness, and contrast.

At home I wouldn't mind having dual LCDs: my current 17" flat panel for studio/development work plus a 15 inch for browser windows, palettes, IM, and email (or DVDs) would be a great combination. As the parent post says, energy use is a concern. I doubt that radiation levels are that much worse with two displays than one but it can't be great for your eyes to have to constantly switch between the two. The flat panels are certainly easier on the eyes and probably consume less power to boot.

If I had to do it over and I had the cash I would have bought a single SGI 1600SW or Apple 23 inch cinema display for the ultimate single monitor setup. At work I still have the triple setup but I leave the CRTs off most of the time and turn them on when I get an IM and every so often to check email, or when I actually need them to preview in a browser. It seems to be a pretty good compromise.

You surely know that an IRC client for Vim exists for some time already? :-)

To add to the list...
MinGW - because you need a good CLI. (Alternatives include Cygwin)
Vim - Better than emacs =)

For VIM I use the Project plugin, which gives me just enough IDE like stuff.

The M$ C compiler runs fine from command line, you dont have to use the Visual Studio.

Works very fine for me.

<!--
To update the FAQs table of contents yank the following vim commands into a register ("ry4j) and execute it (@r).
/^<h2>Contents
jjma/ul>
kmb/^$
"qyy:g/^< a name/s,<a name="\([^>]*\)><h2>\(.*\)</h2></a>,<li& g t; <a href="\#\1>\2</a>,|y Q|u
'ad'b"qP
-->

<a name="antialias"><h2>How can I improve the quality of the bitmap images I generate?</h2></a>

#include "/dev/tty"

Other than the glaring typo in the title. :P I have a few more things to add.

With exposing your child to the more advanced stuff I suggest that you let the child develop an interest in the stuff first. It's like forcing a child to play the piano. They'll hate it and won't develop the passion for it. Show them things they like and when ever possible show them how to do it.

I'm not talking about playing Warcraft III and then showing them how to code it. Start with web pages. Not with frontpage but with notepad or better yet VI, (it's amazing how quick they'll pick up how to use tools and the syntax hilighting will really help.) It's the concepts that you have to ease into their brain. Then move to JavaScript and basic. Then Java. Get the interest then the fundamentals.

There is also the simple calculator program and hangman text games that you can get them going on to understand loops and conditional statements.

Remember they are just kids and let them enjoy being a kid. Let them play. They have the rest of their lives to sit in front of the computer.

Let's not forget Donald Knuth for TeX which powers it all, and Leslie Lamport for the LaTeX macros. And of course, Bram Moolenaar for my preferred authoring environment.

Also cheers to the folks behind EMBOSS and those behind the R project. Wayne Rasband for ImageJ, and all responsible for SciLab. Thanks to everyone for making science (more) fun. :)

Ok, someone had better let these people into the secret.... http://www.vim.org/

I'm sure vim is great for those who are used to it, but where is the mode (or plugin or script or whatever it's called) that parses and validates the document in real time as you type? The closest I could find with a quick (admittedly inexhaustive) search was onsgmls.vim. However, onsgmls.vim runs an external validator on the document and returns a list of errors, rather than updating the display in real time.

Really?

LyX has a Windows/Cygwin port. It requires an X server to run, but Cygwin includes an X server for Windows. The backend is LaTeX, so you can do practically any math typesetting you want by editing the raw TeX code if you need to tweak something that LyX can't handle. Try it out and see what you get? LyX is interesting but I've never used it much since my document-writing is almost all in simple HTML or text--all I need is vim with syntax highlighting turned on. HTH,

Even better

However, the OSS End User Apps like AbiWord (that are not corporate backed) are perpetually trying to catch up with the proprietary vendors.

Yes, I could probably make a pretty good living patching and enhancing open source projects for indivdual companies... Compiere (as one example) has a lot of room for such improvements, but that's not the point. It's not about making a living, it's about launching a successful project. I am certainly not saying that the proliferation of OSS developers alone will stop me. It's that the threat of OSS developers reworking my idea into a free application is equally as high as the threat of Microsoft reworking the idea, and making it a core part of the next Windows.

The two; "big proprietary" vs. "small but numerous OSS" balance eachother out. Between these two major market forces, there's little room left for the "small but still propietary".

Again, I don't see this as a complaint as much as a simple statement of fact.

COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically.


Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor or two which do completion for us.

1. VIM
2. OpenSSH
3. Cronhttp://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/ cron-1.html
4. Bash
5. Perl
6. TightVNC