The Best Text Editor Ever
Anybody who I have rustled into trying linux has heard me rave about this program called Vim which, up until about ten minutes ago was the coolest text editor in the world. Well, I just found something that chews up gVim (graphical interface for vim) and spits it out (command line vim: I still love you and will use you in every ssh session until I croak) on a lifehacker post. LH has been putting out some great stuff lately, but this is a real gem.
Sidebar: Micro$oft Word is NOT a text editor, it is a bloated piece of garbage (especially 2007). For that matter, neither is Open Office Writer (which I personally use for documents and have nothing against). Both of these are for laying out and prettifying text, they are not, however, text editors. A text editor is something that you edit a plain old .txt file with. Notepad is an example (albeit a poor one) of a text editor.
Ok, any non-geek reading this is getting confused at this point. Joe, WHY are you so excited about something that only edits stupid text files? Well non-geek, if you would bother to try linux, you would have already fallen in love with text files and you would already understand why notepad is so sub-par (I categorized this pretty geeky, what are you doing here anyway bear with me). When I write code, the code file contains plain old text and spaces. It doesn’t need to have all sorts of cursive fonts and inline pictures and other worthless stuff… just characters and spaces. After a couple pages of typing out code, everything starts to kind of blend in. That makes it nice to have syntax highlighting (again, non-geeks, bear with me). Syntax highlighting is color coding of code. It is also nice to have line numbers so when I get a ‘FATAL ERROR… you missed a squirly bracket on line 104 and you are a worthless coder and you smell bad and have a farmer’s tan’ you can go straight to line 104 to fix the problem without having to count every line to get there.
Anyways… since I can’t remember exactly where I was going with that rant, the shiny new (to me) toy that everybody should have is called Notepad++ (get it here). This thing can do anything with code short of writing it for you better than you could have. Syntax highlighting & line numbers, code auto-completion, file browser, multiple windows, integrated command line (that of course sets it’s path to your working directory), and function indexing. Check out the site for a complete feature list.
So now that I have this cool new toy… maybe I should be using it to code instead of gracing you with my words.