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

[Alan Gauld]

On 06/05/13 20:54, David Robinow wrote:

> 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.

You can run grep from within an editor and then step through each 
occurence of the search within the editor just as you'd do for errors. 
This becomes powerful when dealing with many files and you want to 
seamlessly step from one file to the next. Most IDEs will do this within 
  the context of a "project" but it comes for free in Unix.

>   I never thought tags were worth the trouble

Tags are great on large projects. I once worked on a project where we 
bought the core software from an external company and it came with 
10,000 C files and little or no documentation. We had to understand it 
by reading our way through it (grep for main() and start from there)
By running tags on the source we could jump from any point in the code 
to the definition of a function regardless of which of the 10,000 files 
it was located in. That is a huge timesaver! Again an IDE will do the 
same trick but tags are standard in Unix.


>   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.

Absolutely! And I never install Windows for my own use without adding 
cygwin. (And before Cygwin appeared it was the MKS Toolkit - which cost 
real $$$!) But if it's not my PC that's often not an option. And in 
server farms they get nervous about installing anything that's not 
absolutely required. In Unix I get it all for free.

>   I've never heard of a scripting language that's not available on Windows.

Available as in installable, yes (although that's a fairly recent thing 
- often via cygwin!). But Unix has them by default. You have to put a 
lot of work into making Windows look like Unix...

> This is all really off-topic for this list so I'll quit now.

Only slightly. Beginning programmers often wonder about the best tools 
and why pro programmers often use different tools to the ones they pick 
as beginners.

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