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chaosgeisterchen

Member

From: Kefermarkt, Upper Austria

Registered: 2006-11-20

Posts: 550

Searching for: A proper programming editor

Good evening,

in search for a good editor for doing some basic programming I have come across multiple applications, but I have not yet found the perfect one for me. With VIM I liked the auto-identation and even more the great color schemes. Coding looked great when using it - and it even worked with CLI only, but I have never plunged deeper into its own universe. What I do not like about VIM is the uncommon way of controlling it. I am used to do it the fast way - saving with CTRL+S - which takes me quite some more time with VIM, but that's something I could overcome. I had some problems with the control- and editing mode of this program. The paradigma behind VIM seems to be fascinating, but it might not be perfect for me.

Next one was Kate. Nice-looking KDE app, extensible and with a lot of options. Auto-Identation as well, but I miss the color schemes. Code looks awful, awful predefined colorschemes. I do not really want to work with it.

Scite - nice for editing but I could never get myself to like it.

What would be great would be an application like TextMate for Mac OS X. It supports some kind of IntelliSense (I have no other word for it - Visual Studio coined it back then) and keywords to create predefined codeblocks (for instance: typing pydef and hitting the tab key will create a fully matured def-structure for Python with spaceholders for each element from which to which you can jump by pressing tab). Nice colorschemes would make programming a lot more pleasuring. Maybe it's simply too much I want it to have, but maybe there's an app which gives me all I want and need.

Thanks in advance and greeting

cg

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skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

Emacs does everything you want (actually, just about everything, period), but it has an almost vertical learning curve (and you'll eventually have to learn Lisp).

Geany offers at least the IntelliSense and template keywords, but I think it just takes the current color scheme from GTK. I'm not sure about that, as I haven't used it in a while.

Scribes is an interesting project that takes the idea of templates to their limit. It has a nice Flash demo that gives a good overview of its capabilities.

pauldonnelly

Member

Registered: 2006-06-19

Posts: 776

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

I also recommend Emacs. These days, it even comes bundled with a decent text editor! Just enter M-x viper-mode to get it.

You are aware that :w saves in Vim, right? I'm not sure what you're doing that takes much longer than Ctrl+S.

Phrodo_00

Member

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2006-04-09

Posts: 342

Website

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

I also recomend scribes, I've been using lately for my c/c++ assignments and it's pretty solid, templates are the rocks.
Afair, it doesn't have color schemes, but it does let you change the colors.

STiAT

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2004-12-23

Posts: 606

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

I like Geany a lot to be true. I also like Kate for development, but scribes looks very interesting and promising... but i probably would end up writing templates instead of code

Also, scribes has some major problems for me:

Load Error: Failed to decode file for loading. The file your are loading may not be a text file. If you are sure it is a text file, try to open the file with the correct encoding via the open dialog. Press (control - o) to show the open dialog.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/TextView.py", line 1025, in __refresh
    self.__editor.response()
AttributeError: 'ScribesTextView' object has no attribute '_ScribesTextView__editor'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/TextView.py", line 1025, in __refresh
    self.__editor.response()
AttributeError: 'ScribesTextView' object has no attribute '_ScribesTextView__editor'

Last edited by STiAT (2007-06-19 10:45:56)

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Xilon

Member

Registered: 2007-01-01

Posts: 243

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

I have pretty much replicated TextMate's functionality, though it's not perfect, in Vim. Vim 7.0 has "IntelliSense", called OmniCompletion, built in, so that's taken care of (use ctrl+p/n in insert mode). SnippetsEmu covers the snippet feature TextMate has, though it's quite far from perfect. I don't use it since I don't really like the way it works with indetation and such, but it's as close as I've gotten. In general Vim has (or has the potential to have) EVERYTHING you could ever want from a text editor.

Before coming to Vim I was using Scribes but i didn't like it due to it being a gnome app. The snippet/template feature is built in, though it's a bit less flexible since the available languages are hard coded, and when I used it it was hard to export/import the templates. In general it's quite a nice little editor but I never felt at home. Not sure if it has "IntelliSense".

soloport

Member

Registered: 2005-03-01

Posts: 442

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

The one thing that's kept me using emacs (since 1985) has been last-kbd-macro ;-)  Used to assign it to C-z -- for taking the drudgery out of repetitious work.  Now, the latest emacs release has assigned it to one of the F# keys: F3 to start macro edit; F4 to end macro edit; F7 (?) to run the last macro.  Sweet!

lessthanjake

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2005-11-09

Posts: 319

Website

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

Emacs does it all, and it even looks good if you install one of the versions from AUR. But it may requier some configuration

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

It supports some kind of IntelliSense (I have no other word for it - Visual Studio coined it back then)

The proper term is usually "code completion".  And vim has it.

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Zoranthus

Member

From: muc

Registered: 2006-11-22

Posts: 166

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

Jedit might be what you are looking for. It can do pratically everything you'd expect from an editor plus some really cool/weird stuff (like writing in several lines at once) and a nice plugin base.

Personally I switched from jedit to gvim a few months ago, though.

mosor

Member

Registered: 2007-04-02

Posts: 22

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

It supports some kind of IntelliSense (I have no other word for it - Visual Studio coined it back then)

The proper term is usually "code completion".  And vim has it.

Actually, Vim doesn't have IntelliSense equivalent, because it doesn't "understand" the code, class hierarchies/members/methods, itd... That's something I miss the most while hacking Python code with Vim - WingIDE has such great code completion.

nj

Member

Registered: 2007-04-06

Posts: 93

Re: Searching for: A proper programming editor

What I do not like about VIM is the uncommon way of controlling it. I am used to do it the fast way - saving with CTRL+S - which takes me quite some more time with VIM, but that's something I could overcome.

If ctrl-s for save is something you want, you can easily implement it in vim.

inoremap <C-s> <esc>:w<cr>a
nnoremap <C-s> :w<cr>

If you decide to stick with :w (or even if you don't), I can recommend the following map:

nnoremap ; :
vnoremap ; :

This allows you to enter extended mode by just hitting ; instead of :. It seems like just a small change, but it really makes a big difference, at least for me.

Actually, Vim doesn't have IntelliSense equivalent, because it doesn't "understand" the code, class hierarchies/members/methods, itd... That's something I miss the most while hacking Python code with Vim - WingIDE has such great code completion.

Make sure you have :set omnifunc=pythoncomplete#Complete, which it should be whenever you edit a python file, and use ctrl-x ctrl-o to complete. The completion isn't always perfect, but it works fairly well.