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

David Robinow drobinow at gmail.com
Mon May 6 21:54:02 CEST 2013


On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
You haven't gone into enough detail for me to tell whether I'm missing
anything. I'm not understanding what you're saying about grep although I've
used next-error with C code in emacs.
 I never thought tags were worth the trouble although the tools are
available on Windows.
 I should mention that I've been cheating since I use cygwin so I have
access to most of the "Unix" text tools on Windows.
 I've never heard of a scripting language that's not available on Windows.
This is all really off-topic for this list so I'll quit now.
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