Java Reference
In-Depth Information
has a huge learning curve—which is why we aren't going to cover Emacs or
XEmacs at all in this topic.
Our favorite editor is still
vi
—in part, we're sure, because we already know
it so well. But like any skilled craftsman, even though you may have a favorite
hammer or saw that you use on most of your work, you will still have several
others ready in your toolkit, and use specialized ones for certain tasks.
2.3.1
One important kind of editor available on Linux is the
stream editor
, or
sed
. It
allows you to perform editing on the data that comes in on standard in and
writes its result to standard out. Similar to the syntax from ex mode in
vi
(and
based on the simple
ed
editor), it can be very useful for making changes to large
numbers of files in one go.
You can learn much more about
sed
from its manpage or from the topic
UNIX AWK and SED Programmer's Interactive Workbook
by Peter Patsis.
Editing Your Pipes (sed, the Stream EDitor)
2.3.2
Linux comes with a wide range of open source software, not all of which is in-
stalled on every installation. You may need to use your Linux installation disks
to add these programs to your system. Whether it's RedHat's package manager
or SuSE's YaST2 or Debian's
apt-get
, most Linux admin interfaces make it
easy to add these extra packages. Of course you can also resort to the Web for
finding and downloading additional open source software.
Here's a quick listing of some of the many editors that you might find to
your liking. The description of each is largely “in its own words,” based on the
text that the authors supply with their software.
Simple Graphical Editors
•
jedit
is a cross-platform programmer's text editor written in Java. The
Java-based portability seems appealing. This is a very powerful editor and
a popular choice.
•
pico
is a small easy to use editor.
•
mbedit
is a multiplatform editor.
• NEdit is a GUI style text editor for workstations with X Window and
Motif. NEdit provides all of the standard menu, dialog, editing, mouse
support, as well as macro extension language, syntax highlighting, and a
lot of other nice features (and extensions for programmers).
