Open Source

Once you get used to it VI is pretty good.

我觉得还是记事本实用吧......

I just use vi via ssh session in putty. I dont do much with a gui interface...

I'm a bit of a newbie...and started in again with unix duties as part of my new job.
I promptly set up a SUSE box..(is SUSE ok around here?)
I then remembered having used Emacs once, and liked it...

So, I downloaded the gz & after about 1/2 hour of getting "you are missing this frikin lib . now you're missing that frikin lib..." messages I gave up.

Either this linux installation is missing tons of libraries, (SUSE Pro 9.2) or there is still not a user friendly means of installing packages to date on a Linux machine...

However, being a self described newbie, I'm open to having gone about it wrongly..

I really would like to get emacs up & going...
Rich

Well, silly me..
I musta been going aboot it the wrong way..
Just went to 'Software' via Yast & it asked for CD#3...
man, what was I thunkin....

DDD - data display debugger, looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it before..


I had heard of "the omniscient debugger" for java.. but that's not really relevant.

I found that the Eclipse IDE wasn't so annoying.. plus of course the good debugger it has in it. Though I can see why you'd prefer a text editor, it is slimmer. And still ess annoyign, even nice!

But, it's not just the debugger..
Also, IDEs have a feature, i'm not sure what it is called. But a text editor probably wouldn't do this. It has a suggestion style autocomplete feature.. It knows all your methods(like functions/procedures) and variable names. And as you type a name, the drop down menu shows all the possibilities. This is very useful particularly in a language like java where you have these long identifiers, like
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, FileNotFoundException , IllegalARgumentException. There are many of these things.. This feature isn't about creating an abbreviation for them. But suggesting what method you are calling.
Also, when you have an object, and you want to call some method, then as soon as you type object1. it'll list all the methods(functions/procedures) of object 1, with their parameters and types.
And this is also useful because variables are case sensitive. And can be quite long.

And also, you can browse around your code quite quickly within a file, because it bookmarks all the methods/functions, so you can just click the name of the function listed in one window, and in the other window it jumps to that portion of code.

ALL HAIL vi

It takes some getting use to, though.