Lin/Win text editors

On Feb 4, 2008, at 9:52 AM, Chris Pepper wrote:


> What do y'all suggest?

4-5 years ago I used UltraEdit, mostly for Perl scripting rather than
html. Looking at the current features, it supports SFTP, has some
command-line features, find/replace works across multiple files and
has "Perl compatible regular expressions" and "Option for Unix style
Regular Expressions", does file comparison (hard to say how good it
is relative to BBEdit), and it has an "Integrated IE Browser."
UEStudio is an IDE built in UltraEdit, it looks like you need this
for CVS/Subversion support.

If UltraEdit's diff capabilities are insufficient, another of their
products, UltraCompare, may make up for it. It works with UltraEdit
and UEStudio.

http://www.ultraedit.com/

Have you looked at Eclipse? That's the only GUI option I'm at all
familiar with for Linux (as well as Windows and OS X). I don't know
how well it fares against your feature checklist.

http://www.eclipse.org/

On 4-Feb-2008, at 07:52, Chris Pepper wrote:
> I will soon lose my ability to run BBEdit at work
> <http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/02/01/goodbye-ru-hello-gs/>, but I
> took the job anyway. Now I'm wondering: What text editor should I
> use? I
> use vi, but it and emacs are both too obscure and non-obvious for me
> to
> do heavy-duty editing work in.


I like the graphic vim, actually. Yeah, it's still vim, and that's
still vi, but it's pretty decent for a die-hard cli user like myself.
gvim7.1 is available in three flavours for windows (regular, OLE and
one that runs under Windows 3.11, iirc).

As for sftp, are you sure? Webdav is a lot easier to setup, admin,
and it even mostly works in Windows. Mostly. Still, if you need to
use sftp the way to do it would be to do all this stuff through the
shell and use ssh instead. sftp is really a poor 'tack on' to ssh.

My sympathies on having to use a windows machine though. Fate worse
than death, taht is. :)

--
"You can speak soon and write like a graduate college if me let you
help for a day of 15 minutes" 1963 #1

> I use vi, but it and emacs are both too obscure and non-obvious for me to
> do heavy-duty editing work in.

Them's fightin' words!

VI and VIM are really extremely heavy duty editors -- especially for
programming. The first thing I do whenever I get on any machine -- be
it Windows, Mac, or *nix, is download the latest version of VIM from
http://vim.org. It takes a while to get use to, but I have never found
a program editor as powerful as VIM.

If you want something ...er... more graphical, try SciTES which has
many of the features in VIM, but runs on all platforms (including Macs
when running X11):

    http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html.

There is a native Mac version, but I have not yet been able to download it.

On Feb 4, 2008 9:52 AM, Chris Pepper <pepperreppep.com> wrote:
> I will soon lose my ability to run BBEdit at work
> <http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/02/01/goodbye-ru-hello-gs/>, but I
> took the job anyway. Now I'm wondering: What text editor should I use? I
> use vi, but it and emacs are both too obscure and non-obvious for me to
> do heavy-duty editing work in.
>
> Things I like about BBEdit (not really ordered) which I'd like in
> another (graphical) Linux or Windows text editor (preferably Linux):
>
> sftp support (I can simulate this with FUSE, but that doesn't scale
> well for editing a single file across many remote systems)
> Decent command-line integration (I use bbedit and bbdiff heavily)
> GREP-compatible find/replace
> ... across multiple files, with optional filename filtering (so I can
> avoid .svn directories and .jpeg files)
> Graphical diff display & resolution (I've used sdiff, and it worked,
> but I'd like something more flexible and integrated)
> HTML preview in browser (bonus points if it can convert a local file to
> a real http:// URL for server-based preview)
> CVS/Subversion support
>
> I set up WinEDT for a user years ago, and it seemed powerful and
> extensible, but I have never looked at it for my own requirements.
>
> What do y'all suggest?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Chris
>
> --
> If you want to unsubscribe or change your address, use this link:
> http://emperor.tidbits.com/webx?unsub.3c3f6899!u=305447b1
>



--
--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

UltraEdit is about the best text editor you'll find on Windows. Very
powerful, and I almost never find myself saying "Man, BBEdit can do
that SO much better!" when I use it.

<http://www.ultraedit.com/>

On Linux, there's a lot of options.

You already mentioned vi and emacs. Both are, potentially, worth
learning. You get the benefit of having a comfortable text editor
available on ANY Mac or *nix machine, which also works great at your
web host of choice over SSH. You can even run it on Windows under
Cygwin.

If you really need a graphical version, you can learn the command-line
version from within the comfort of a GUI by looking at VIM
(VI-Improved) or xemacs.

<http://vim.org/>
<http://www.xemacs.org/>

While both are graphical, they aren't really MADE to be graphical. So
you get menus but not really good integration. If you're using the KDE
desktop, Kate is really worth a try. Powerful, graphical, and it has
the advantage of cut-and-paste between all KDE apps. If you're on
Gnome, I think gedit is the de-facto standard, although it has little
to offer that VIM or xemacs does not.

<http://kate-editor.org/>
<http://www.gnome.org/projects/gedit/>

I hope that's helpful. Good luck!

--Nik

At 6:52 AM -0800 2/4/08, Chris Pepper wrote:
> I will soon lose my ability to run BBEdit at work
><http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/02/01/goodbye-ru-hello-gs/>, but I
>took the job anyway. Now I'm wondering: What text editor should I use? I
>use vi, but it and emacs are both too obscure and non-obvious for me to
>do heavy-duty editing work in.

        jEdit might be worth checking out. I have not used it much, but it
seems to have a large support community and is cross platform (Mac OS X,
OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows) and GPL to boot, with what seems to be a large
number of plug-ins which might meet many of your listed desires.

<http://www.jedit.org/>




--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

On Feb 5, 2008, at 8:56 AM, LewisGmail wrote:

> As for sftp, are you sure? Webdav is a lot easier to setup, admin,
> and it even mostly works in Windows. Mostly. Still, if you need to
> use sftp the way to do it would be to do all this stuff through the
> shell and use ssh instead. sftp is really a poor 'tack on' to ssh.


What setup for SFTP? If you have OpenSSH (and almost every UNIX
system already does), SFTP is often enabled by default and if it's
not, doing so is about as complex as uncommenting a line in a config
file.

SFTP isn't really something you admin, you don't setup separate home
directories or access controls as you often do with FTP servers. Good
or bad, users will have the same access through SFTP as they do
through the shell.

Just to be clear, SFTP is "SSH File Transfer Protocol," not "Secure
File Transfer Protocol." I know there are methods for encrypting FTP
but I don't know anything about setting it up.

As for WebDAV, would you really setup such a thing on a non-web
server? Would you use it to access the entire file system? Arranging
for the SSL certificate alone would make it more complex to setup and
admin than SFTP. It's been a few years since I tried using WebDAV,
does it come "out of the box" configured to create per-user shares or
with minor changes that don't require doing something for each user?
That's something that's pretty easy even with a Samba server.

I will soon lose my ability to run BBEdit at work
<http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/02/01/goodbye-ru-hello-gs/>, but I
took the job anyway. Now I'm wondering: What text editor should I use? I
use vi, but it and emacs are both too obscure and non-obvious for me to

do heavy-duty editing work in.

        I set up WinEDT for a user years ago, and it seemed powerful and
extensible, but I have never looked at it for my own requirements.

        What do y'all suggest?

--On February 5, 2008 5:56:40 AM -0800 Jesse Swensen <alaskamac.com> wrote:

> I use a great product on Windows titled UltraEdit (http://
> ultraedit.com). The cost is reasonable at ~$50. It is a very good
> text editor with FTP/SFTP, Telnet and SSH capabilities. Color syntax
> highlighting is very flexible and you can customize it to highlight
> any language. I find it to be an indispensable part of my daily work.

I use this as well. I've not tried the SSH capabilities. The diff utility
built-in is pretty good, they have a super diff package available as an
paid program that integrates with ultraedit.

i don't think it has any command-line utilities included. at least i
haven't used them.

i've written syntax highlighting for 2 languages. It's good but it takes a
bit to figure out. THe Help get's you going pretty quick on this. They also
have a LOT of downloads for additional languages available.

It does find/replace on reg-ex (don't think you mentioned this, but I find
it indespensible in both BBEdit and UltraEdit) it defaults to it's own
reg-ex but supports Unix style as well.

Another vote for vim here. It is the first thing I install on new computers of any flavor.

-- Bill Rausch

We first make our habits and then our habits make us. --John Dryden

Chris, one of the key questions here is what are you going to be DOING
with the text editor?

If you're doing, say, development, Eclipse is a nice option because
it gives you a whole IDE for development. Likewise, NetBeans is great
for java development.

For general purpose editing, I think the other suggestions I and
others have made are good ones.

--Nik

On 6-Feb-2008, at 06:43, Curtis Wilcox wrote:

> As for WebDAV, would you really setup such a thing on a non-web
> server?

Yes, if I wanted file level access to user files I would. However, to
be fair, I did assume you were talking about webservers for some
reason. It's the easiest way, from the use side, to have that level of
access. Each user only has access to their files and has no access to
a shell. I might also go with webmin, if we're talking user
interaction.

> Would you use it to access the entire file system?

Er, no. I would use ssh/scp for that, or rsync.

> Arranging for the SSL certificate alone would make it more complex
> to setup and
> admin than SFTP.

making a cert for webdav is trivial.

> It's been a few years since I tried using WebDAV,
> does it come "out of the box" configured to create per-user shares or
> with minor changes that don't require doing something for each user?

You can setup a default webdav setup for users much like you setup a
default http for users.

> That's something that's pretty easy even with a Samba server.


I really depends I guess on how many users you're talking about.

While the user interface pales in comparison, PSPad (www.pspad.com) is a fantastic text editor when stuck on Windows. It has most of the features you seek, but sadly is saddled with FTP only - no SFTP support. It has good macro support, a decent DIFF, color syntax highlighting, and everything ELSE on your list. No SFTP, but it does cost exactly $0, so I thought I'd mention it here as perhaps someone else can benefit.

Most important, it can optionally run without installation, which is helpful if you are stuck somewhere without local admin rights on a Windows box.

        Thank you all for the many helpful suggestions! I start Feb
25th, and have been focused on a Linux migration for my personal site
<http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2007/12/08/upgrading-from-tiger-server-to-linux/>,
so haven't had a chance to dig into these many options.

        I would prefer Linux (or Solaris 10/x86, which is reasonably
close for compatibility purposes) to Windows, where UltraEdit sounds
like the prime contender; I may try E too.

        I tried jEdit on the Mac, and was unhappy that it weights
Courier inconsistently onscreen
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1889043&group_id=588&atid=100588>;
additionally, I managed to close the Editor window, leaving only the
jEdit menu, so I could Quit but not Open; I suspect this may be
Apple's Java bug and a non-issue on Linux, but it's discouraging.

        I've used kate & gedit a bit, and found gedit useful but
unimpressive (several years ago). Eclipse is a good idea, although
I'm not planning on any real programming.

        I do use vi, but prefer to have mouse & menus support for
heavy editing; I'll check out gvim. I'll look at SciTE, which sounds
interesting, although "It is best used for jobs with simple
configurations" from the homepage is not entirely encouraging.

        To the person who suggested WebDAV access over SFTP, I'm a
systems administrator, so I'll need to work with lots of systems that
don't run DAV.


                                                Thank you all!


                                                Chris
--
Please note: My last day at Rockefeller University will be Feb 20th.

Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
                              <http://www.extrapepperoni.com/>