I regret nothing. Say what you want.
Edit: I just saw the two typos. If you find them, you’re welcome to keep them.
I coded several of my early mobile app releases entirely in gedit. Good times.
I sometimes forget how good we have it now. I wrote those apps around 2012 and the DX for the platforms was basically non-existent. Virtually every platform had shit documentation, shit version management, a shit IDE with minimal refactoring features, a shitty debugging experience, and everything felt like it was being botched together by 3 guys in their spare time.
It’s incredible now that we have things like hot reloading. You can literally save a change and BAM it’s on the screen seconds later. On native platforms no less. Astounding.
if you’ve never used
ed(1)technically it’s illegal for you to say “it’s a UNIX system, i know this”I’ve used
ed.Ctrl+Alt+F3htop/edF9EnterThe irony being that scene had a GUI and ed is, well…
?obligatory FSN links
- https://web.archive.org/web/19991009154641/http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html SGI webpage archive from 1999
- https://github.com/DX94-Quas/3d-file-system-navigator - SGI fsn binaries here, for IRIX versions 5.3 and below
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer - 1999 free software rewrite in C
- https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv - fork of 1999 version, updated 2018
- https://github.com/jtsiomb/fsnav - 2009 C++ free software rewrite, updated 2021
And then there is a colleague who programs in Notepad++ directly on the test server and then just copies his code to prod.
(yes, he works alone on that project)
I do it in nano over ssh. The shortcuts suck but it gets the job done.
I recommend “micro” which is like Nano but uses modern shortcuts. Making it a terminal editor which feels more like using notepad than something esoteric.
I used to copy code into nano over ssh. Then I randomly tried pasting the server address in my file browser and it connected over SFTP. This was ages ago. I was using Crunchbang Linux, maybe around 2011 or so.
You can enable modernbindings in nano to get standard shortcuts like ctrl-s for save.
Did not know this. Will certainly look into it because my nano over ssh days aren’t over yet haha.
What about people, who just burn the machine code directly onto a CD with a laser?
Pff, real programmers use butterflies. We open our hands and let the delicate wings flap once. The disturbance ripples outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form, which acts as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.
i’ve programmed in edlin. so there.
doesn’t vim come with the Ubuntu installation?
Man I just use Notepad or IDLE most of the time, I feel you man
I genuinely do a lot of coding in Kate, the standard KDE editor. It’s enough to do a lot of things, has highlighting, and is more than enough when you just need a quick fix.
I am also still using nano when editing stuff in the terminal. Please, don’t judge me.
To be fair, Kate isn’t just a text editor, it actually is an IDE. The text editor version would be kwrite, which would be horrible to program in.
Wow, you’re right of course. I completely forgot kwrite still existed, tbh.
Kwrite doesnt really exist on its own anymore. Its a slimmed down gui for kate now.
Oh wow you’re right, it’s basically just kate without some of the toolbars now. Hadn’t used plain kwrite in a while.
It also doesn’t have Sessions.
Making it a better choice when you want to quickly open/create a file (the Session selection menu requires a lot of tabbing or using the mouse)
We’re almost like coding siblings lol
Yep, I came here to say that Kate is really nice. Even though I’m an emacs user and won’t use it.
Nano, on the other hand, can’t do almost anything, so I can’t recommend that people make heavy use of it. It’s ok for random small edits, but that’s it. (By the way, YSK that you can set your terminal to use Kate as the default editor by setting the $EDITOR variable.)
KWrite is the standard text editor. Kate is the advanced one. The name actually literally stands for “KDE Advanced Text Editor”
I’m not aware of distros preinstalling KWrite, though…?
Huh, I did not know that any didn’t. I just tried a bunch, and here is a quick breakdown of what was preinstalled on each:
Distro Kate KWrite Bazzite true true Fedora false true KDE Neon true false Kubuntu true false Manjaro true true openSUSE true false SteamOS true true Well, I can throw in another for free:
distro Kate kwrite openSUSE true false But yeah, interesting list. These days, KWrite is basically just Kate with different configuration, if I understand correctly, so it always feels like you might as well go with Kate. In my opinion, KWrite is also not particularly easier to use, since basic editing works the same, but I guess, that can be disagreed on.
I do like that Kate is pre-installed. Imagine Windows, but rather than notepad.exe, you get Notepad++ out of the box. Now imagine that to also be a whole lot better and then that’s what it feels like to have Kate on fresh installations.
You can just start coding something right away, without it being necessary to install a different editor.
Geany is a nice GUI option. It’s a bit more capable but still lean.
It’s probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.
Me too. I’m still not sure what the problem is and I’m kind of afraid to ask.
I do have the plugin for multi-line editing set up, I guess.
All the cool kids use vim, so using nano makes you uncool, I guess. But I use Mint, so I’m uncool anyway.
“Me who codes with the text editor that came with Ubuntu”…
So VIM?
More like gedit
I think gedit is a great text editor.
Doesn’t it ship with nano these days?
Both, last I checked.
Don’t you have to install that? I thought Ubuntu came with vi and nano.
vi in base Ubuntu isn’t really vi. It’s vim-minimal.
Vim and emacs are text editors.
Vs code is a code editor (but really it’s also just a text editor)
Maybe they mean IDEs like visual studio?
I’ve never really heard it called a coding GUI before.
I see you’ve never used emacs.
“it’s a bit limited for an operating system”
I never quite understood the massive hard-on programmers have for splitting hairs.
Vim (and NeoVim) are as much coding environments as VS or JetBrains. The difference is in the defaults.
So an IDE is a code editor that ships with an LSP server, not just an LSP interface? (Doesn’t have to be LSP as such but “stuff that an LSP server does”).
My understanding has always been:
-
Text Editor: just writes text, no formatting (other than line endings)
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Code Editor: A family Text Editors that have additional capabilities such as syntax highlighting. And optionally a plugin or extension ecosystem. (VSCode, vim family, Emacs, even gedit )
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IDE: An application that includes Code Editor functionality, but also includes tools for a building on given tech stack. This comes out of the box, are a “part of” the application, are peers to the code editor, and cannot be removed, but can optionally be extended through plugins or extensions.
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I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)
To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.
Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.
You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.
So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs
Vocode integrates consoles for whatever you want. I use node and sql all the time.
I’d say build and run tools are pretty integrated into vim. Type
:makand there you go, it’s not like vs studio would be a single process either.
For me a web app IDE includes a DB manger, HTML previewer, etc.
A text editor edits text, an IDE is an Environment that Integrates Development tools.
I code using grep’s search and replace.
I code using a telegraph machine in morse code.
I code using punch cards hand cutting each hole with a xacto knife
Learned C++ by using gedit on the Sun machines in my college’s computer lab in 2007. They were decommissioned shortly after I graduated.
If you’re not writing it all down on paper and then punching holes in cards, you’re doing it all wrong
All you need is a magnetised needle and a steady hand. Or butterflies.
Real programmers code with TTL chips.
At uni I did a lot of my Java coursework in notepad, then I’d have to take it into a computer lab on a floppy, tar it and upload it to a unix terminal so it could be emailed to the professor. Java syntax with only the command line compiler is not fun.
