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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Choosing an Editor</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="taoup.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.58.1"/><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The Art of Unix Programming"/><link rel="up" href="toolschapter.html" title="Chapter 15. Tools"/><link rel="previous" href="ch15s01.html" title="A Developer-Friendly Operating System"/><link rel="next" href="ch15s03.html" title="Special-Purpose Code Generators"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Choosing an Editor</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ch15s01.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 15. Tools</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ch15s03.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id2980633"/>Choosing an Editor</h2></div></div><p>The first and most basic tool of development is a text editor
suitable for modifying and writing programs.</p><p>Literally dozens of text editors are available under Unix;
writing one seems to be one of the standard finger exercises for
budding open-source
hackers<a id="id2980650" class="indexterm"/>. Most of
these are ephemera, not suitable for extended use by anyone other than
their authors. A few are emulations of non-Unix editors, useful as
transition aids for programmers used to other operating systems. You
can browse through a wide variety at SourceForge or ibiblio or any
other major open-source archive.</p><p>For serious editing work, two editors completely dominate the
Unix programming scene. Each is available in a couple of minor variant
implementations, but has a standard version you can rely on finding on
any modern Unix system. These two editors are
<i>vi</i> and <i>Emacs</i>.
We discussed them in <a href="complexitychapter.html" title="Chapter 13. Complexity">Chapter 13</a> as part of our discussion of the right
size of software.</p><p>As we noted in <a href="complexitychapter.html" title="Chapter 13. Complexity">Chapter 13</a>, these two editors express sharply
contrasting design philosophies, but both are extremely popular and
command great loyalty from identifiable core user populations. Surveys
of Unix programmers consistently indicate about a 50/50 split between
them, with all other editors barely registering.</p><p>In our earlier examinations of <i>vi</i> and
<i>Emacs</i>, we were primarily concerned with
their optional complexity and the surrounding design-philosophy issues.
Many other things are worth knowing about these editors, both as a
matter of practicality and of Unix cultural literacy.</p><div class="sect2" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h3 class="title"><a id="vi_literacy"/>Useful Things to Know about <i>vi</i></h3></div></div><a id="id2979331" class="indexterm"/><p>The name of <i>vi</i> is an abbreviation for
&#8220;visual editor&#8221; and is pronounced <span class="phonetic">/vee eye/</span> (not <span class="phonetic">/vie/</span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>definitely</em></span>
not <span class="phonetic">/siks/</span>!).</p><p><i>vi</i> was not quite the earliest
screen-oriented editor; that palm goes to the Rand editor,
<span class="emphasis"><em>re</em></span>, that ran on Version 6 Unix in the 1970s. But
<i>vi</i> is the longest-lived screen-oriented
editor built for Unix that is still in use, and is a hallowed part of
Unix tradition.</p><p>The original <i>vi</i> was the version
present in the earliest BSD software distributions<a id="id2979416" class="indexterm"/> beginning in 1976; it is now obsolete. Its
replacement was &#8216;new vi&#8217; which shipped with 4.4BSD and is
found on modern 4.4BSD variants such as BSD/OS, FreeBSD, and NetBSD
systems. There are several variants with extended features, notably
<i>vim</i>, <i>vile</i>,
<i>elvis</i>, and <i>xvi</i>;
of these <i>vim</i> is probably the most popular
and is found on many Linux<a id="id2979464" class="indexterm"/> systems. All the variants are rather
similar and share a core command set unchanged from the original
<i>vi</i>.</p><p>Ports of <i>vi</i> are available for the
Windows operating systems<a id="id2979493" class="indexterm"/> and MacOS<a id="id2979501" class="indexterm"/>.</p><p>Most introductory Unix books include a chapter describing basic
<i>vi</i> usage. One place a <i>vi</i> FAQ is available
is the <a href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/editor-faq/vi/" target="_top">Editor
FAQ/vi</a>; you can find many other copies with a WWW keyword
search for page titles including &#8220;vi&#8221; and
&#8220;FAQ&#8221;.</p></div><div class="sect2" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h3 class="title"><a id="id2979540"/>Useful Things to Know about Emacs</h3></div></div><p><i>Emacs</i> stands for &#8216;EDiting
MACroS&#8217; (pronounce it <span class="phonetic">/ee´·maks/</span>). It was originally
written in the late 1970s as a set of macros in an editor called TECO,
then reimplemented several times in different ways. In an amusing
twist, modern Emacs implementations include a TECO emulation
mode.</p><p>In our earlier discussion of editors and optional complexity, we
noted that many people consider Emacs
excessively heavyweight. However, investing the time to learn it can
yield rich rewards in productivity. Emacs
supports many powerful editing modes that offer help with the syntax
of various programming languages and markups. We'll see later in this
chapter how Emacs can be used in
combination with other development tools to give capabilities
comparable to (and in many ways surpassing) those of conventional
IDEs.</p><p>The standard Emacs, universally
available on modern Unixes, is <i>GNU Emacs</i>;
this is what generally runs if you type <b>emacs</b> to a
Unix shell prompt. GNU Emacs sources and documentation are available
at the <a href="ftp://gnu.org/pub/gnu" target="_top">Free Software Foundation
archive site</a><a id="id2979609" class="indexterm"/>.</p><p>The only major variant is called
<i>XEmacs</i>; it has a better X interface but
otherwise quite similar capabilities (it forked from Emacs
19). <i>XEmacs</i> has a <a href="http://www.xemacs.org" target="_top">home page</a>.
Emacs (and Emacs Lisp) is universally
available under modern Unixes. It has been ported to MS-DOS (where it
works poorly) and Windows 95 and NT (where it is said to work
reasonably well).</p><p>Emacs includes its own interactive
tutorial and very complete on-line documentation; you'll find
instructions on how to invoke both on the default
Emacs startup screen. A good introduction
on paper is <i>Learning GNU Emacs</i> [<a href="apb.html#Cameron" title="[Cameron]">Cameron</a>].</p><p>The keystroke commands used in the Unix ports of
Netscape/Mozilla and Internet Explorer text windows (in forms and the
mailer) are copied from the stock Emacs
bindings for basic text editing. These bindings are the closest thing
to a cross-platform standard for editor keystrokes.</p></div><div class="sect2" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h3 class="title"><a id="id2979678"/>The Antireligious Choice: Using Both</h3></div></div><p>Many people who regularly use both <i>vi</i> and
Emacs tend to use them for different
things, and find it valuable to know both.</p><p>In general, <i>vi</i> is best for small jobs
&#8212; quick replies to mail, simple tweaks to system configuration,
and the like. It is especially useful when you're using a new system
(or a remote one over a network) and don't have your
Emacs customization files handy.</p><p>Emacs comes into its own for extended
editing sessions in which you have to handle complex tasks, modify
multiple files, and use results from other programs during the
session. For programmers using X on their console (which is typical on
modern Unixes), it's normal to start up
Emacs shortly after login time in a large
window and leave it running forever, possibly visiting dozens of files
and even running programs in multiple Emacs
subwindows.</p></div></div><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ch15s01.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="toolschapter.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ch15s03.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">A Developer-Friendly Operating System </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Special-Purpose Code Generators</td></tr></table></div></body></html>