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The #vim channel is on IRCnet.

There is an IRCnet server list on www.vim.org here.

Productivity seems to be related to comfort level. Whilst I use vim, my colleagues are prone to use UltraEdit, IntelliJ, JBuilder, Visual Café, or anything else they're comfortable with. The best tools are extensible, and support either scripting or plugins.

When we use Togethersoft, it is mostly for modelling. It nicely integrates with any editor, updating its models on each file save. It is expensive, and they don't negotiate price with medium size (150 head) shops. (Based on our experience here in the UK)

Haven't had much luck finding a decent IDE for my environment (servlets->EJB->JDBC, etc, etc). What I have found that works well is a good text editor: gvim. Syntax highlighting, and my fingers know vi. CVS for source control and ant for build/distribution. Also have had good luck with optimizeit for profiling java apps. Profilier is especially nice because it lets me attach to an application server and filter out application server specific classes (which can be many). This allows me to really see what my beans are doing. Also fond of jprobe for debugging. Using many different apps for different aspects of development can be a pain in the ass, but I've found that after a little meddling around, it works quite well. Anyhow, just my 2 cents.

Because my Java work is almost exclusively centred around servlets, I don't need anything too fancy GUI-wise. In fact, I find the best way to work is the same way I've worked with other languages for years - with a text editor and a build tool. Vim is IMHO still the best source-code editor around, but what is there to use as a build tool when it comes to Java?

Ant, of course :) Ant's a very powerful build tool that combines an XML-based build-script markup with the power to write your own custom tasks in Java, and in my environment it makes building/testing/deploying a breeze. Simple, powerful and effective - great stuff :)

We use Borland's JBuilder at our startup company for the past year and a half and most everyone has been very happy with it. It's a pure Java environment and will work on Linux (I ran JBuild exclusively on a SuSE Linux-ified Dell laptop at my last job) and runs very quickly, unlike Netbeans from what I've seen. There's an API for creating add-ons to the IDE and people have created many free ones out there (that one has a few and one that was hosted on Angelfire had a lot but is gone now).
My favorite is jVi which changes the editor to act like VI/VIM. I think JBuilder comes with an emacs editor option out of the box (zip file) as well. There's also Clearcase opentool that I used for a while but I've found it too slow for my taste in the long run.
A lot of Developers here use EditPlus for editing XML, XSL and JSP and they can't say enough good things about it. Personally I love VIM, it's good for what ails ya.

In addition to what other posters have said in reply, I'll add a rebuttal to the silly "replace all |'s with e's" example Tog cites:

This does not prove the keyboard to be less efficient than the mouse at all. It only proves that the keyboard interface he used was slower than the mouse interface he used.

I can easily believe that somebody scrolling with cursor keys (even with word and sentence skip commands) will be slower than somebody with a mouse. Even if the keys 'felt' faster.

In today's world that would be like giving an average user the same editing task in MS Word. Personally, I would opt for a different keyboard interface, say, vim. Now with gvim somebody can use the mouse (just as in Tog's example) to select the |'s and type e to replace them. But I guarantee that I'll be faster than anybody you pit against me (in real time, not 'subjective' time) for anything more than a trivial case. The keystrokes are thus:

/| re n. (repeat n. for each |)

/| searches for the next |. re replaces the character with an e. n searches for the next |. '.' repeats the last editing action.

If the paragraph is large, I can do it even faster:

qq/|reqN@q

where N is the approximate number of |'s in the paragraph. This is a little slower to set up, but allows you to replace N+1 |'s with (13 + N mod 10) keystrokes. The break-even point I'd guess is around 8-10 replacements, compared to the first method.

My point? Saying the mouse is always better than the keyboard is overgeneralizing. Use the best interface available to you. If you get some choice of interfaces, I believe the more refined keyboard interfaces around are generally faster than the mouse interfaces, especially for tasks like text editing.

By the way, nice troll.

Christopher

Ever need to parse or rework a file with 1000 lines? No problem. Just write a 10 line elisp script that does it for you with regexp. This took you maybe 5 minutes and saved you hours of work! yay emacs!

I'm glad you like emacs so much. But I like vi just as much as you like emacs.

Using the powerful global search-and-replace functions in vi, you can do powerful things without writing any code to do it. Years ago, I helped a guy in one of the college computer labs; he had typed in a Pascal program just like it was in the textbook, i.e. with all the keywords written in ALL CAPS. The problem was that Berkeley Pascal was case-sensitive and didn't recognize ALL CAPS keywords. I told him he could either use the -S switch every time he compiled (-S for "standard" behavior, and standard Pascal is case-insensitive) or else I could fix it for him. He chose to have me fix it. I typed a one-line regexp that meant "find all words that are two letters long or longer, and are all upper-case letters, and force each one to lower case". In vi, this command looks like this:

:%s/[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]*/\L&/g

Much easier to type than to explain! Want the explanation? Here goes...

':' enters command-line mode (as opposed to interactive text-editing mode) for one single command; '%' means run the command on every line in the file; 's' is the search-and-replace command; "[A-Z]" matches any single upper-case letter; '*' means "zero or more of whatever comes before the '*'", i.e. "[A-Z]*" means zero or more upper case letters; "\L" means "force everything after \L to lower case"; and '&' means "whatever text was matched in the search part of the search and replace command".

Anyway, I typed it in (didn't take long; I'm a fast typist and I didn't need to look anything up). I hit the Enter key, and on his screen, every ALL CAPS keyword simply went to lower-case. I really don't think he had any idea how I did that; he looked pretty surprised.

One of the cool things about vim is that you can recall, and edit, previous command-line commands you typed in; so if you have a typo in a complicated search-and-replace, you can simply undo it, fix the typo, and run it again. Nice.

I now use the version of vim that has integrated Python support, so I can write powerful functions in Python if I like. I prefer Python to LISP, so I'm happy. Plus vi has always had the ability to filter selected lines, or the whole file, through an external program; you can feed a messy source file through an indenting program or whatever. You could even feed a messy source file through a 10-line LISP program if you wanted to!

People should use vi, or emacs, or whatever else makes them productive. emacs doesn't have an exclusive lock on Zen-like elegance.

P.S. www.vim.org

steveha

Yes, you should rather link to the mirrors available.

;-) heh

+++ATH

Let me guess: you're an emacs user, right? I'm not trying to start a flame war here (honest!) but you might want to try vim, or perhaps a vi-like binding for emacs (like viper mode). vi-style keybindings tend to be much easier on the fingers (especially the pinkies) than the standard emacs bindings.

1. OpenNap
2. XFree86
3. Cygwin
4. Emacs
5. Vi and Vim
6. Mojo Nation
7. Visual Tcl
8. MikTEX
9. Open Perl IDE
10. Mozilla
11. WinCVS
12. BitchX
13. Firebird
14. mySQL

CJW

Okay, horses for courses.

_If_ you're career makes it absolutely necessary to learn vanilla vi, do so.

If not, vim is so much more capable it is well worth having it added to a system you're using for anything above a shortish time. [IMO; blah, blah.]

BTW, I work in a "hardcore Solaris" shop, as the NT developer (!) and weedled the admin into providing me bash as a shell on the servers and I compile/install vim on them myself.

Vim available via here.

If you want to order this book, please use the links at the vim.org site. A portion of your order will be donated to help children in Uganda. Thanks.

I apologize if this is redundant, but I didn't find any mention of it yet.

VIM has a charityware license. If you use VIM and like it, you can donate to the Kibaale Children's Centre, which helps orphans in Uganda. In VIM, type ":help iccf" to get more info, or go to ICCF's web site.

If you're downloading, use a mirror. The list is available here.

In case the server is still under the /. effect, here are some mirrors for you to try:

ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.au.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.ca.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.de.vim.org/misc/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.berlin.de.vim.org/misc/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.musin.de/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.dk.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.es.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.fr.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.fr2.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.gr.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.hu.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.jp.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.tokio.jp.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp2.jp.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.kr.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.mx.vim.org/
ftp://ftp.nl.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp2.nl.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.pl.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.ci.uminho.pt/pub/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.za.vim.org/applications/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.ca.us.vim.org/pub/vim/
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/unixfreeware/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.nasa.us.vim.org/pub/unix/vim
ftp://ftp.mi.us.vim.org/mirrors/vim/
ftp://ftp.ny.us.vim.org/editors/vim/
ftp://ftp.il.us.vim.org/packages/vim/
ftp://ftp2.wa.us.vim.org/pub/vim/

Here the main us mirror site as vim.org is in Germany http://ftp.us.vim.org/vim/

Java has proven itself plenty fast for server side stuff, but screen I/O has been a downfall. If Caldera has a really good client gui JRE, it might be worth the $59 for those using Together, Forte and homegrown Java gui apps. (I'm still coding in Vim).

Of course, I haven't really seen 1.4 on Redhat yet. It's in its second beta now, and it's supposed to have much improved graphics performance.

Now this is assuming the Caldera guy wasn't pissing in my ear--I can't find any mention of a custom JRE on their web site.

Of course, the real problem with this, is that it wasn't VIM

;)

CLI tools are the opposite. They are hard to learn, but once you know them, they are fast and efficient. Vim is a perfect example of this. The editor is simply amazing. It has a keyboard interface to do nearly anything you want to do. The only problem is, it's very very difficult to learn. You don't know what all your options are. You have to goto :help and start searching for something simliar to what you want to do.

Simple solution to simple problem. Install gvim (apt-get install vim-gtk for debian users, or vim.org for the rest of ye), and use that. It's pretty, it's fast, it's vim with menus. Nothing stops you from treating it like command-line vim, but if you don't know the standard vi commands, you can use the menus - which, incidentally, have the shortcuts on them. That's how I learned that I can use :wq to save and quit, :e to open a file, and so on - and now I use them instead of the menus.

I couldn't possibly have learned vi without gvim, since I'd have spent more time in the help than in my files. Now that I've used it though, I can go into most any copy of vi and get around pretty well (except that the original vi sucked pretty bad compared to vim).

Very sweet, very nice.

--Dan

Why not use vim seeing as how there is a Windows version and it has lots of useless/full features (multi undo, syntax highlighting) that plain vi doesn't.

Not true, but I can understand why you would say this.

Before free software can innovate beyond the state of the art, it has to achieve the state of the art. In some areas, free software has been state of the art for years: running tasks on a server, for example. Apache is an extremely popular web server, and it has been around about as long as web servers have; the free software world didn't have to play catch-up, Apache hit the ground running. Compare with the desktop environment. Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984, but it was a joke. It became usable in 1990, good around 1992 (Windows 3.1, can't swear to the exact year) and in 1995, a decade after it first appeared, it was refined and polished and ready. GNOME and KDE both have taken less time to get to where they are now, and they will gain polish quickly now.

I agree that the menu editor in GNOME sucks. I'm not sure I agree that the root menu should be as customizable as you wish for; I like being able to find things on strange systems. Debian has a balance I like very much: the main GNOME menus you can edit as you like, but there is a "Debian" menu where everything is always in the same place. So on any strange Debian machine, I can still find a web browser and launch it. (But this is free software, and it is very possible for someone to hack the code to give you what you want.)

I read Linux Weekly News every week, and I am constantly reading about cool innovations, many of them in the Linux kernel itself but some in user programs. For example, the Tux web server showed how tight integration inside the kernel could speed web access, and now Microsoft is doing web servers that use the same idea; free software was there first. There are lots of little cool hacks being rolled into the kernel all the time, making it ever faster; just this week in LWN I read about a simple patch that improved the virtual memory manager's performance by 12%!

The Python language, IMHO, blows the doors off of Visual Basic, and it's free software; and the free editor vim is available now with Python compiled in as a macro language. I was excited when I found that one out: my favorite editor, now with a full-powered scripting language! (I guess you had to be there. Or something.)

In short, there are lots of innovations all around us.

In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.

By definition, a "killer app" is something you cannot get anywhere else. When Visicalc first appeared, it sold a ton of Apple II computers: people who worked with numbers would go to computer stores and say "Sell me a Visicalc!" Well, of course they needed an Apple to run it on, so they bought that too. Lotus 1-2-3 was a dramatically more powerful spreadsheet than Visicalc, and had graphing too; in other words, it had valuable features not available anywhere else, so people bought in on the IBM PC platform. Desktop publishing worked on a Mac long before it worked on a PC, and so sold a ton of Macs.

Now, I'm trying to imagine an application that you can write for free operating systems that is not available anywhere else, and will not quickly appear on Windows and the Mac if you do write it. Nothing comes to mind. I don't think there will be any killer app for free operating systems.

The free stuff is going to win, though. My definition of winning, in this context, is that normal people will use free software in such large numbers that it will become impossible for Microsoft or anyone else to lock people in with a proprietary product. I will be happy when Microsoft Word flawlessly imports and exports AbiWord documents, because there are so many AbiWord documents out there that Microsoft simply cannot ignore them. That day is coming.

steveha

• You want an editor - Get VIM - Vi IMproved

Now I'm taking it as a challenge to write my perl using vi.

FWIW, I've way too recently started playing around with adapting vi. I work on an NT laptop, an OSX iMac, and various Linux servers all day long. All of them are running vim &/or gvim. They all share the same .gvimrc intialization script. They all do a nice job (not perfect, but nice) with syntax highlighting & coloring. It's not point & drool-y like VB is, but it's nice. Poke around vim.org to learn more. Now that I'm used to it, I've set it as my default for all editing on Windows, and have just about given up on Pico (finally!) on the Linux boxes. It's like taking off the training wheels... :)

I was in the search for an IDE, kdevelop was ok. But a cvs repository, wel make make files, a sane ANSI-C compiler like gcc -Wall -Werror -ansi and good old vim with syntax highlighting is a joy to work with.

My less than $0.02

The only disadvantage of the Visual Studio IDE(or any other) is the capabilities of the editor.

...and VIM is available as an editor in Visual Studio!

Although, I must say I agree with the posters who advised against an IDE. Emacs in development mode is great, although I must admit I prefer VIM with a terminal window open when I am developing Python under Linux - under windows, the pseudo-IDE PythonWin works great for me. C++ gets done in editor/shell mode.

The only disadvantage of the Visual Studio IDE(or any other) is the capabilities of the editor.

...and VIM is available as an editor in Visual Studio!

Although, I must say I agree with the posters who advised against an IDE. Emacs in development mode is great, although I must admit I prefer VIM with a terminal window open when I am developing Python under Linux - under windows, the pseudo-IDE PythonWin works great for me. C++ gets done in editor/shell mode.

While you said you want to explore a different, cross-platform language, the examples you listed were all integrated development environments IDE, not languages. Indeed, ActiveState's Komodo IDE can actually be used to develop in many different languages:

Komodo recognizes multiple languages including JavaScript^(TM), HTML, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, XML, and XSLT

But, perhaps the real question is, what do you plan to do with this cross-platform language? Apart from being able to run on more than one platform, do you need:

• speed
• easy GUI development
• standardized database access
• standalone executables, interpreted scripts, browser-as-client, or server-side development

On the IDE side, what features are you looking for:

• syntax highlighting
• syntax completion
• auto-formatting
• debugging
• integrated help and reference info
• drag'n'drop GUI development
• code repository/version control
• IDE itself running on different platforms
• free (beer or philosophically) or proprietary

As with many problems in life, you need to refine your question before you're going to be able to come up with the right answer. Putting together a good set of requirements really helps when you're trying to solve a problem. And it helps other people provide intelligent commentary.

I think that being able to install free software on as many platforms as possible is a good thing. GCC under Solaris is a whole lot cheaper then Sun's solutions and does the trick. I use VIM on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and I've used it on Solaris and HP-UX. Why? Cause it kicks some serious butts. What would I do if the license was as restrictive as Open Motif's?

Have you ever tried running vi locally instead of remotely?
Over a 9600 bps line (like those used on some old terminals) it really sucks, I agree.
But if you download some vi clone and run it on your computer...

I liked the book a lot because it focused a lot on making the human machine interface more efficient. I pretty much hate gui's that force you to jump through umpteen dialogs to configure something that should take 5 or 6 key strokes and Raskin seems to understand this.

I even had my wife a non-programmer read the section on modalism, which has greatly enhanced her ability to turn on the TV and actually play the TiVo or DVD successfully without calling me.

After reading the book I am even more rabid about my adoration of ViM

One problem ... in the book he talks a lot about products like this Canon word processor that didn't seem like commercial successes. They may have been "humane" or even efficient, but no one bought them. What good is that?

• The magician working the Sun booth was great. Forcing a card into the deck is nothin', but stapling it to another card was pretty cool.
• Bought a GNU Make book from the FSF folks, just to help 'em out. Got lectured (by Bradley Kuhn, I believe) on why Vim is inadequately free.
• Was pleased to see some old-school trade show action goin' on: Two hot blondes in front of a Lamborghini. Of course, I have no idea what the company was.
• Recruiting like crazy. Booths from upstate NY, Florida, Singapor and Irvine, CA urging us to move to their part of the world. Headhunters abounded.
• Tchotchkes were definitely smaller this year. The coolest was a flashing superball, but that was about it.
• I REALLY wanted to swap badges with someone and go check out the Waste Age show across the hall, but the coworker I went with wasn't interested. Still, I got some great trade rags: Journal of Solid Waste Management; The Hauler; etc.

Vim is available for Win32.

Hey man, wherever gvim builds and runs, I'm there.


--

The great circle is now complete; before, we could run edlin on Linux; now, we can run vi on Windows.

(shut up, I know, it was a joke).

Now if only someone will write a HOWTO on compiling your kernel under Windows...


-

you know you use emacs too much when you try to ctrl-c->ctrl-X out of this post

<pedantic>you know you're not using emacs enough when you don't type C-x C-c to exit emacs. </pedantic>

Of course, it's entirely possible that you type it correctly, but don't remember typing it. Me, I prefer vim.

Use vim.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.

I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).

On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).

If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).

--

First, who said you need a big budget for "proper software"?

I don't know how many people think of it but I've become very comfortable editing html over a telnet session with vi[m]. SSH with compression turned on is even better then telnet.

• Get vim and force yourself to learn what seems to be a weird interface, once you learn it it is very powerful: http://www.vim.org
• OpenSSH: http://www.openssh.com
• If you need a cross platform SSH Client, MindTerm is rather good despite the java bloat: http://www.mindbright.se/mindterm/
• If your using php and have more cpu cycles then bandwidth then my gzip code is a quick fix: http://Leknor.com/code/

Also, sed, ps, find, grep are great little utils. I recently relized I could write quick shell scripts on the command line like this:
$ for x in `ls *.html`; do echo $x; done
I know that is very simple but it gives you an idea where to start.

Leknor

Vim is an _awesome_ vi derivative. Syntax highlighting and a million other cool features blended into a very smooth programming and editing environment. It's pretty small too (~1.8Mb stripped) given all the things it can do. The syntax is pretty easy, in practice (with recent vim versions) all I need is ESC to get to command mode, and i to go into insert (i.e. edit) mode. in command mode :w writes out the file, :q quits, and :wq writes and quits. That's, what, 5 commands? I bet notepad has more menu options than that... :-)

The first thing I do on a new system is install vim and symlink vi to it. The second is usually transitioning to qmail.

--

VIM (VI) is also available for Windows.

2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...

WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.

Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.

I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.

Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.

But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.

There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?

So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.

The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.

The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.

For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?

For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.

Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...

---

The VIM (VI clone) author has a charity that needs donations. Click here if you're interested.

Oops:

PHP Triad
Vim
Emacs

Nice conspiracy.

Actually, if you read the phiosophy section of the GNU website, and then look at how RMS behaves in public, you'll see that it's painfully obvious that this "conspiracy" is true. RMS is a control freak and an egomaniac.

No, RMS wants us to have what was taken away. Freedom is the opposite of domination. Do I need to repeat that?

It sounds like you have a very simplistic view of the world. Freedom isn't an absolute. For every freedom someone has, there is a freedom someone has lost. In a "fair" system, it generally boils down to each individual has freedoms by sacrificing others.

For example. I don't have the freedom to go into your house and eat your food without your permission. But I don't mind this, because I also have the freedom from you coming into my house and eating my food without my permission.

Supposedly* RMS wants everyone to have the freedom to get the source code to, well, to any software that's available; people should be able to distribute the source, as well as any derivatives, (like compiled binaries) without even getting the permission of the original devloper. They can also modify this as well.

(* I say "supposedly", because many of his actions dealing with GCC and Emacs haven't been as "free" as they could have been...)

Those are the freedoms RMS wants us to have, but you have to realize that if we accept these freedoms, we have to give other freedoms away. For example, developers can't reasonably expect to be able to sell their software. The only people who can really make any profit off of software are the packagers, and the "value adders" (support sellers, T-shirt sellers, etc.). Is that a reasonable trade-off? Many of us don't think so.

I also think it's funny that you say "RMS wants us to have what was taken away". I assume you're talking about copyright here. In a "natural state", you can copy any data you want, but copyrights prohibit this. In that sense, you're partially correct.

However, RMS also wants developers to be prevented from releasing code without source. In that respect, he's taking away something that was there naturally. (Think about it: If I write a program, and release it without source, have I taken anything away from you? Nope.)

Personally, I think free software is great. But I think it should be the choice of the developer. Developers shouldn't be pressured into developing free software by being told that it's immoral. Having the source, and being able to distribute the code without having to pay royalties is merely a (very nice) feature. Software which doesn't have that feature isn't any more immoral than a text editor without a scripting language. Sure, I'd prefer a text editor with scripting support, but if I find a text editor that lacks this feature, I'm not going to accuse the developer of being immoral. That's infantile.

Likewise, I'd prefer a text editor that's "free software". That's a nice feature too. I'm not going to accuse the developers of "non-free" text editors of being immoral either. Their software simply lacks a feature that I desire. (For the record, I use VIM which is "free", and has scripting support - both features I desire.)

vim has a good win32 port.
http://www.vim.org
http://www.vim.org/binaries.html

vim has a good win32 port.
http://www.vim.org
http://www.vim.org/binaries.html

Try vim. The windows version looks almost exactly like the gtk version. You can either grab the dos-box version (vim) or the GUI version (gvim).

That way, you have the exact same editing enviroment for both linux and windows.

Hmmm... Two free pieces of software I can think of off the top of my head are Lynx and vim. Both are quite Mac friendly. But IIRC, both require you to use MPW to compile...

Vi IMproved: http://www.vim.org
Lynx: http://lynx.browser.org

Any other examples?

--Matt

• X with xterms (courtesy of XFree86): $0
• cscope (courtesy of SCO): $0
• vim (courtesy of Sven Guckes): $0

The best IDE that money can't buy: priceless

This post brought to you by the letters v and i.

Yeah, talk about an unbiased, objective article (wink, wink). It's not like Sessions has anything to gain with this Microsoft brown-nosing. Here's a quote:

Java is not the first time the industry has been promised a WO/RE solution. In fact, this has been a recurrent theme since the dawn of software. Unix, CORBA, and C++ are just a few examples of the many products that originally made similar claims.

George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Unfortunately, the collective memory of our industry seems particularly poor. WO/RE has never worked and it seems unlikely to me that it ever will. And we appear to be caught in an endless cycle of relearning this lesson.

How about C++? I've run the same exact C++ code on Solaris, Linux, and Windows NT. I'm sure it would run on any other OS with a C++ compiler.

Vim, written in C, runs on about 50 different operating systems.

It's irritating that the author suggests that portability (recompiling -- admittedly a weaker form of WO/RE) just doesn't work. Obviously, it does. But then why would Roger Sessions (a very good author, and I liked his COM book) misrepresent the true state of affairs?

Oh, yeah, Microsoft is threatened by WO/RE, so it must be a failure. Shame, shame!

I can't resist this quote, either:

So Microsoft did an about-face, and threw its full strength behind Java the language. I see no evidence that this support has slacked off in the slightest. Microsoft seems fully committed to providing the best tools available for creating components using Java. Although Microsoft will always support other component development languages, I believe Java is Microsoft's language of choice for implementing the software that will run on the component tier.

I've programmed in Win32 and MFC a great deal. Swing is vastly superior, in functionality, design, and simplicity (that's just my opinion, of course). I know he wrote this article three years ago, so I'll cut him some slack. But don't quote it like it's still true.