[Tutor] Text Editors and Linux (was Re: exit message)

[Alan Gauld]

On 06/05/13 16:13, David Robinow wrote:

> I certainly agree about IDLE and prefer a text editor myself. I don't
> use Linux much and haven't noticed the "practically an IDE" part. Could
> you expound?

Unix is a software engineers OS. It comes with dozens of tools and they 
are nearly all integrated. So for example the text search tool grep can 
output its results in the same format as the compiler outputs errors. 
This allows text editors to implement features like "goto next error" 
and "goto next grep line" using common code. And many different editors 
use that same standard format.

Other tools analyze test coverage, profile execution, monitor system 
calls, analyze core dumps etc. Similarly the Unix debuggers tend to have 
common mechanisms which make them easy to integrate with editors.
The tags tools allow the OS to build a database of function definitions 
so that an editor can jump from a function reference to a function 
definition with ease.

Other OS features like command pipelines, a plethora of scripting 
languages, and a gazillion text processing commands all mean Unix can do 
most of the tricks modern IDEs do in other platforms.

The things that are less easy to reproduce tend to be things like
command completion, tooltip help and project creation/maintenance. There 
are tools to help with those but not as slick as an IDE.

Those are some of my favourite "Unix as an IDE" features, I'm sure there 
are others I've missed.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/