Java Reference
In-Depth Information
The list of choices for editors is quite long. One of the beauties of the
Open Source approach is that personal choices like favorite editors aren't
squashed by arbitrary decisions: If you want, you can write an editor; others
can adopt it.
Test drive a few; try them on for size. Remember that there can be a
learning curve to climb. Don't necessarily settle for the easiest to learn—it may
not be able to handle all that you'll need it to do, which may cost you more in
the long run.
Speaking of editors that aren't easy to learn, we can't discuss editors
without a mention of Emacs. To quote the GNU Emacs project home page:
4
Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display
editor. If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is Emacs
is a text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (“elisp,”
for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to
support text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:
• Content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from
plain text to source code to HTML files.
• Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
• Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.
• Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the Euro-
pean “Latin” scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai,
Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts. (Sorry, Mayan
hieroglyphs are not supported.)
• A large number of extensions which add other functionality. The
GNU Emacs distribution includes many extensions; many others are
available separately—even a Web browser.
There is another variant of Emacs called XEmacs. It came from the same
code base but split over differences both technical and philosophical.
5
Now if
you thought that
vi
had a lot of obscure key sequences, you ain't seen nothin'
yet. With its Lisp interpreter Emacs is incredibly extensible and powerful, but
4. This is from
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html#Whatis
.
5. If you want to read more about those differences, and how they came about, see
http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html
.
