On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:20 AM, Daniel Taylor <random at argle.org> wrote: > For those who do not know. > > Before there was vi there were ed (the line editor) and sed (the stream > editor). > > In the days of paper terminals ed was the ultimate interactive text > editor, you could (in theory) write your thesis using it. I'm sure > someone did, because college students are That Way (that, and you could > save a backup copy and pay someone with a nice typewriter and decent > typing speed to make it pretty for you if you had more money than most > college students).<http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list> My first experience with ed was watching my friends code their realms on LPC based MUDS. I remember cringing in horror at the thought of having to forgo the luxury of vi to code their realms. :) Now I'm using Aptana Studio 3 (a nice, free, rails-savvy IDE) to develop in as I work my way through my Rails book. The "little things" the built-in editor does are much appreciated. Smart indenting - automatic insertion of matching brackets and closing tags when necessary. If I line-break after opening a brace the editor adds an extra line-break to put the closing brace on its own line at the proper indent level. If I create a new file it has the correct boilerplate templated in... When I begin open up a new tag a pop-up list of all tags matching the prefix is presented if I want, or I can ignore it and keep typing. It's all stuff I could do myself, but over time it's saving me a lot of key strokes. Most non-vi text editors induce hiccups for me, but using this editor has been a seamless transition. Pretty impressive. -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100831/251a2a72/attachment.htm