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note: anyone who suggests VI is an macho idiot who cannot be trusted, emacs is functional but still fairly shitt. Come out of the the 1980's, guys

Vim is incredible and GNU/Emacs with the JDEE is a fantastic Java development environment.

But seriously...my sig does not say "their IDEs suck...", it says "beware their IDEs"...they rope you in and tie you down:

Ever tried developing a decent plugin for their IDEs (think SCC: the version control API)?

Ever worked with someone who only knows MS IDEs and try to work on something "different"?

Ever tried to develop an "open standards" application with their IDE?

More than 15 years of development on their "IDEs" and they still don't have a decent REGEXP search-and-replace...don't have "keyboard macros"...still don't have very effective mouse-free (i.e. keyboard exclusive) navigation.

So yes, they have done some very nice things in their IDEs. But you compare VI and Emacs , which are extremely powerful editors that now have compiler/debugger (IDE) capabilities to MS IDEs which are very powerful development environments with a low-end editor. (Yes, VI and Emacs now have Intellisense too).

Windows NT Resource Kit used to have vi.exe ("Microsoft VI"). I nearly fell off the chair laughing when I first saw it.

Don't know about SFU (when I have to use Win32 (about once in several months), Cygwin is enough), but what's wrong with using a Win32 port of VIM?

Especially if you swap esc and caps lock

From VIM website:

Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it's distributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make a donation to help children in Uganda through the ICCF.

I can't believe this question was even asked. vim is the obvious choice for content management, bar none. Give your parents the gift of vim this season!

Earlier versions did do the aforementioned problems. Earlier versions also had problems with files that were too large (and would order you to open them up in bloated WordPad).

And why can't the stupid thing open up files with Unix-style line breaks? I mean, come on. That's awful. Every simple text editor should have no problem with that.

But then again, there's always vim for Windows.

Try vim

Ah! Now that makes more sense. Though of course he would now be using Vim :)

Yep I understand and also think we need a more friendly website to produce information for alternatives to Microsoft software. For those of you that have seen the Blue Screen of Death, goto FuckMicrosoft.com. For those of you that enjoy a little spice with your operating system, try GNU/Lesbian or RTFM OS. And for those of you that always RTFM, try Emacs OS; just remember that when using Emacs OS, you need a good wordprocessor and the best one you can get is here.

Ive been using XP for a while now and these are the essentials that I've found I can't live without
1 : Firebird (IE sucks leprous donkey balls, opera cant render properly, mozilla is slow, firebird is the best)
2 : Gvim is the best editor out there for code and text alike (remember to disable backup files)
3 : PuTTy retreat to a comfortable bash shell ;)
4 : XP Powertoys virtual desktop manager,cmd prompt here context menu and of course...
5 : TweakUI turn off those silly windows defaults
6 : a good FTP client,WS-ftp is a good one
7 : Winace,the only compression tool youll ever need!
8 : startup monitor monitors for extraneous crap adding itself to startup
9 : strokeit ,mouse gestures for windows,Yay!
10 : Nethack the only game you need (safe for work too)

that might not necessarily be in the right order and this doesnt count amusement software like media players and whatnot but those are my most used tools at work

• The Bat! mail client (shareware)
• Opera browser/mail/newsclient (adware), much more lightweight than Mozilla
• 40tude Dialog newsclient
• Total Commander file manager (shareware)
• eMule peer-to-peer client (open source)
• ViM
• editor (open source)
• GhostScript and GSView for PostScript and PDF rendering/conversion/manipulation (open source)
• ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl for scripting
• 7-zip packer

Isn't there a chicken-or-egg issue here? If I were writing commercial software for the Mac, I wouldn't assign any functionality to function keys because users who don't do the triple-reboot maneuver simply won't have them conveniently available under OS X. Of course, they could use the Fn modifier, but then a function key becomes an awkward two-handed maneuver.

As for using function keys, I'm usually a vim user myself, but I sometimes use Emacs because it has some fabulous programming modes that I can't do without. I map the function keys to things like setting and clearing breakpoints, spawning a shell, etc. I could assign these functions to "lower-keyboard" Ctrl or Meta-key combinations, but Emacs is already keymapped to saturation. At least the function keys start out pristine.

That shouldn't stop you from using vi, though! Head over to vim.org and grab a copy of Vim for Windows and you're all set...

If you find Notepad to be a little limited, try using gvim. It takes a bit of effort to learn how to use its features (syntax highlighting, text folding, vertical block selection, macros, and many, many more things), but since gvim has a menu system, all you need to know is:

1. When in command mode, press "i" to enter insert mode
2. When in insert mode, press "Esc" to enter command mode

You can learn the rest as you use it.

I write for a living. I sell novels. The lifespan of a novel is over a decade -- if it's a successful one, several decades. I don't dare use proprietary storage formats that may become inaccessible in five or ten years: plain text with embedded markup is essential. And markup in a simple macro format I can roll my own parser for if I need to -- I currently use POD format as it's rich enough for writing novels as well as Perl documentation.

But I still have to keep a copy of Microsoft Word to hand. Because the publishers I deal with want an electronic copy for their typesetters these days, and they expect everyone to use Word, despite its gross inadequacies as a novelist's tool (untameable Autocorrect, insane file-format lock-in, stupid reliance on mouse over keyboard, and all).

Anything more, and you're going to need a REAL editor

Like Vim ;)

Years of developing software brought me to XEmacs, which is just a subtle variant from FSF's/Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs. Functionally they're, for most practical purposes, identical. Like Emacs, XEmacs has got a learning curve like an Olympic ski jump and it takes a good long while (months) before you're very productive with it. But I can do just about everything with it that I do on a computer: email, programming, Usenet, personal information management (including scheduling and a contact database), screenplay formatting, XML, even ASCII drawing with Emacs' picture-mode.

In short, it's legendary, and probably most everyone here has heard of it. But for those who haven't, and who have a penchant for twiddling and fiddling with software that has about ten thousand options and endless opportunities for customization (gotta learn elisp, a lisp variant, to do it), then I highly, highly recommend XEmacs or, if you want to be a free software purist, go with GNU Emacs, but you'll have to download the source for the moment because last I checked the GNU ftp servers were still recovering from an exploit and trying to gather checksums for potentially compromised software. Yikes!

As far as my writing habits go, it's been enormously convenient for me to apply the quick navigational keystrokes I've learned for Emacs to my writing projects. Everything just becomes so much faster and intuitive. And doing most everything from one customizable editor allows me to create an environment that I understand from my own personal viewpoint without having to learn a slew of special features and keystrokes from other software packages.

Emacs isn't for everyone, I will say that. And since learning many software packages for special purposes -- one for HTML editing, one for XML (like XMLSpy), one for screenplay formatting (like Movie Magic Screenwriter) -- isn't exactly a trial given that it seems like most people's brains seem to adjust to whatever "mode" of work they're currently engaged in, many will choose that route. But again, if you feel so inclined, give Emacs a try, you might grow to love it. But be prepared to give it time.

Oh, and there's always Vim. It's an excellent, ultra-powerful editor that's basically for people that wished they could grok Emacs but, for some sad reason, simply can't.

I do a lot of ASP3.0/SQL2k and some utility development on Win32, taking a stab at .NET. It would be nice to move over to Mono.

Anyway, I've done a bit of poking around and ran across SharpDevelop - AKA #develop . It's open source a la GPL and looks a lot like Visual Studio, and compiles C# and VB.NET; has C# => VB.NET code conversion; does projects or files; has syntaxing for the whole MS shebang. It's a .97 - this build was released Friday 9/12/2K3, officially in beta, and you can get the binaries here, go snag the source here, and get the MS.NET1.1SDK here.

To those folks who hiss and moan about the whole GNOME/.NET/Mono thing, take a gander at the rationale before playing jump to conclusions (mp3).

SharpWT - AKA #WT is a .NET port of Java SWT on both Windows/.NET and Linux/Mono platforms. So...you can develop your .NET apps to run on both Win32 and Linux with pretty much the same GUI. Neat, eh?

Anyway, intrepid Windows Developer, if you can pry yourself away from the MSDN Library for a few minutes, you might find there's something to this Mono business.

gVim. The latest version (6.2) has gtk2 support, so it matches your gnome2 theme. Take a look at the huge repository of scripts on vim.org, while you're there. They have tree-view code browsers which make gvim much more useful for code editing. I currently use a LaTeX plugin, which contains a number of shortcuts for editing LaTeX files, and vimspell, which pipes text through aspell and red underlines errors as I type. I haven't needed to use a wordprocessor since I installed those two.

The real reason he left: Vi really has improved

Anyone know any good/quick IDEs for Java?

vim

Yesterday, the VIM site was participating in the protest, but today, Bram has posted that the vote has been postponed due to overwhelming protest, and points to ffii.org for more information! And yet, when I go to ffii.org, I don't see any information about anything being postponed... Anybody have more details on this? Egads, life would be a shade darker without VIM on my laptop )-:

VIM.org had a new splash front page for at least a few days, but now it's just the first "news" article there.

I thought it was actually kind of funny... not a real but guster but I cracked a smile when I read it.

Isn't vi available on windows? I'm pretty sure it is... of course. Here you go, pick your poison.

Of course you can also install emacs on windows, and run it in viper mode, in case you ever come to your senses you could then just change modes instead of having to download another editor. ;)

Every single app that I would want to run is already available and runs under Linux natively. For example:

mozilla, neverwinter nights(w/ expansion pack), gcc, gdb, make, gnuplot, bc, gimp, icebreaker, valgrind, electric fence, Crossfire, LyX, angband, Nethack (falcon's eye), vim, XFree86, pekwm and netpbm.

There are few apps that I run that are not on that list. Really, if you think about it. On any computer system the top 90% of the apps you run could probably be counted on one hand.

But I'm one of those unusual people who has his laser printer working in Linux and only has a windows box to test the software I write. I compile the windows version on Linux of course. (using these scripts to build the cross compiler).

For those who start up their IDE in the morning and close it down in the evening (or at the end of the week, whatever), then long startup times are just a minor cost of doing business.

For someone like me, however, who is ambivalent about this IDE or that IDE, and whose fingers are too hard-wired for one particular editor to use the brain-damaged editors foisted by most IDEs, startup time IS a big issue. When you are going in and out of tools all day long, it becomes a major annoyance to have to wait for the darned thing to start up.

After that read Java Development With Ant by Hatcher and Loughran for good info about how to set up real java development environments. Ant is a tool that fits a similar ecological niche as make, but has tons of extra features particularly useful to Java developers.

Oh, and don't bother with an ide. Real men use vim.

Shouldn't OSS be about solving problems that people want to work on rather than trying to be a cloning engine for Microsoft software?

Bingo. Sometimes I shake my head at the lengths people go to bash M$ at every chance they get, then spend tons of effort to clone them. The first blatent one was when RH shipped thier default windowing system to be FVWM95. I still havn't gotten over that one. KDE and to an extent GNOME are not too far behind either. For example. Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?

Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.

Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.

Don't get me wrong. I like OS and there are beautiful examples of its success, like Apache, Linux, Galeon/Mozilla. The last one is an excellent example. I never thought of what I would want out of a browser, I just knew they all sucked a few years ago. However, Galeon is exactly what I want out of a browser.

So, what software do I use on a daily basis? Linux for an OS, WindowMaker for a window manager, mutt for email, vim for an editor, and lord forbid a closed source calendar called corporatetime. I believe that Oracle bought this, its difficult to find info about it anymore.

So what is my point? I get along just fine without M$ nor do I use any software that really has a M$ equivalent. Why do these topics come up all the time? Maybe we should be cloning M$'s slogan too. "Where do you want to go today?" It is a fitting question, right now the answer seems to be "Wherever M$ was yesterday?"

What apps have you been using?

I used Borland's JBuilder 4 on Linux at my last job four years ago for all of my developement with fantastic results.
Most of the developers at my company use Eclipse for their development, a pure java IDE that beats the pants off of any other IDE I've used or seen. The only reason I don't use it is because of the lack of VI keybindings, I use good ol' Vim instead.

The point it moot anyway, Java really shines in the Enterprise side.

Another learning tool is vim. If you have ":set hlsearch" and ":set incsearch", you can construct regexps much the same as in the Regex Coach and see them applied, and it's already installed on most linux machines. It also works on the console, instead of in X windows.

• /usr/share/terminfo/41/Apple_Terminal

You're thinking emacs.

You should be thinking Vim, though.

Some fixed links:

Get vim now!

VSS integration plugin

CVS integration plugin

Completion (on tab key)

• For one, the tabbed browsing is vastly superior.
  • As noted, on a crash your tabs are saved (more important, when you close Opera, you can reopen precisely where you left off).
  • Links that pop up a new window show up as a new tab in Opera, but create a new frame in Mozilla (and Firebird).
  • If a page fails to load, Opera remembers the URL so you can try later. Mozilla leaves it as "about:blank" (Firebird may fix this, but I can't find a page that fails to load right now).
  • Closing a tab will change your current tab to be either last created or last viewed (user can select this). Mozilla/Firebird selects the neighboring tab to the right.
  • Forward/Prev tab is '1' or '2' on the keyboard.
• Single-key functions are much better IMO than type-ahead-find: 'z' for back, 'x' for forward, and g for turning graphics off (with many more) -- and type-ahead find is available in a search box, by default Shift+F7 takes you there.
• "View Source" is easily configurable, and I can use my preferred editor. The mozilla group can't decide whether that should be allowed.

Hmmm...ya know ... my Gentoo box has nano technlogy, but really, I prefer vim myself.

Bram Moolenaar, the author/maintainer of the amazing vim visited a school/community center/development center in Uganda a few years back, and when he returned to Europe, he, along with others, setup a charity in the Netherlands to support the center. Those who use and enjoy vim (and those who don't!) "are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Go to the International Child Care Fund and make a donation, or at least click through their Amazon affiliation links next time you buy something from there. That way, it doesn't even cost you anything...

Wouldn't it be nice to Slashdot a charity with donations? :-)

Perhaps we should all just use LYNX. Or as REDHAT would likes us to use LINKS. WTF? I mean do we really need competing command line text only web browsers.

Christ.

Next it will be incompatable rendering of underscores inlu of a Horizontal Rule.

Then we will have Text-Only browers built into the shell. Thats when linux will become as (in)secure as windows.

We already have a text browser in EMACS. WTF! Why does any one want to use emacs ... Ctrl-F-Alt-Space-Enter-Q just seems fucked up ... but I guess emac ppl like it painfully HARD.

WTF.

What a SAD WORLD. We all should use VIM - Or install windows and use TEXTPAD. FUCK EMACS.

As for Mozilla project names - how about PORTZILLA or GRITZILLA.

In Soveit Russia, web-browser names YOU!

PROPS TO RYAN - He uses VIM!

I suppose tastes are individual in all things, languages and editors alike...

Actually, if you use vim, you can get away with it pretty easily -- just remap the INSERT_MODE only keys. That way, beautifully, the navigation keys stay in the same places. Which is where they were put for reasons such as RSI reasons.

since vi doesn't have it!

:-P

It also does code coloring, flexible auto-indent, browsing to a given tag (like Browse Symbol in JBuilder), make from within the editor allowing a jump right to each error, ditto for file grepping, etc, etc, etc.

And Vim's had all this for years, runs equally usably on my home machine (pathetic K6-333 laptop w/128MB of RAM) and my work machine (P4 1.5GHz w/512MB of RAM) and runs equally well in Linux, *BSD, Windows, and umpty-gazillian other OSs.

It's not as pretty as an IDE, though. Also lets you keep working away w/o having to stop and grop a rodent (unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case it'll give you what you want).

There's a reason other popular IDEs like Eclipse and JBuilder include support for Ant build.xml files!

If you're one of those rabid anti-emacs and/or pro-vi(m) users, you might like info.vim. It's an implementation of GNU info for vim. I haven't used it myself, so I can't vouch for how it looks, but it may be worth a try if you really hate emacs.

If you're one of those rabid anti-emacs and/or pro-vi(m) users, you might like info.vim. It's an implementation of GNU info for vim. I haven't used it myself, so I can't vouch for how it looks, but it may be worth a try if you really hate emacs.

For those of you who're going to read all these comments here and decide to move to some j* editor, hold on! Vim is still the best choice IMHO. It has Java syntax highlighting and with the help of JTags you can also navigate through the sources very easily. You'll miss the intellisense (or, really?) but there's a whole lot of common editor features that you simply can't find in other java-only editors.

I'm speaking from experience -- I worked on a java project for a year and was able to beat the shit out of any of my co-developers using jedit/textpad/jext/jblah. At the end of it, I had 3-4 vim converts in my team.

Lead by example.

Ummm, you can get Vim for Win32. I use it all the time just as in Linux. It's not a cygwin port, either, it's a legitimate Windows program. See here.

I worked in text editing for a lot of time, and have become a firm believer in a concept where arrow keys for left and right were below the space key, right under your thumbs. I think all text-editing people out there, at least those that don't use Vi, would really appreciate this. But I never saw it. Did anyone run into something simmilar?

Win32 vi, you say?

Try this

I know this isn't the same as having a vi interface for Outlook, etc...but I'm in love with it.

Well, I worked as a secretary for many years in the WordPerfect 5.1 era. The answer is that, just as vi commands are hard to learn but easy to use, yes, the function keys in WordPerfect were much easier to use than mousing over menu options. Certainly not easier to learn, which is why an infrequent user gets more done with a GUI, but much more efficient to use once learned.

The point about something like the function keys, and this is often misimagined by those that don't get it, is not that you would learn or memorize all 48 function key combinations; but you would learn the top six, say. And since those six functions accounted for most of what you were doing, that's a significant gain. For those infrequently-used functions, you're poring over the template or popping up the function key help or whatever, and it probably would be easier to mouse over menus for that one.

This implies that the best interface would be a hybrid, with powerful, if cryptic, efficient command sequences and a consistent, if less efficient, GUI as well. Unfortunately, the typical implementation of this blows ("shortcut" keys); I think the best is probably gvim.

For mail we have mutt, for IRC we have xchat or irssi or BX or epic, for composing we have vim. All highly flexible tools perfectly suitable for each job.

I bet you haven't tried to keep up with a conversation amount friends with about 300 emails in an hour with mail.yahoo.com