Rubénerd :)

I’ve been using Unix-like operating systems for years and, much like programming languages, I’ve never been able to settle on one editor. Today I may have finally found the perfect one!

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After using it as my primary editor for several weeks, I feel as though I can finally graduate from nvi. It was more challenging than I thought it would be when I first decided to learn it, but it was a fantastic learning experience.

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Having fun with FreeBSD on my Libretto this afternoon, I didn’t have internet access to install Vim from ports so I decided to finally learn more about the bundled nvi editor. I missed syntax highlighting, but if you customise it right it’s still a nice, lightweight, capable editor.

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Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad’s) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.

Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses… yes
configure: error:

UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support was detected in your curses and/or C libraries. Please verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your curses was built with wide character support, and that your C library was built with wide character support.

I’ve built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it’s using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.

For what it’s worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it’s a feature I’d rather have.

Some people seem to have an almost religious attachment to their text editors of choice, I need not give examples. I tend to gravitate between Vim and MacVim for hacking together single files and TextMate for projects, so when I started doing Java at university again I just fired up the Java bundle in TextMate and off I went.

Back when I was a C++ guy on Windows in early high school I used Visual Studio 6 and later C# in their .NET IDE, but since then I’ve eschewed IDEs in general because I feel as though they take too much control over what I’m doing, they’re complicated and they keep wanting to insert their own code into my files which drives me crazy!

When I started uni and before my major family meltdown back in 2005 I was told to use jGRASP for Java and later Eclipse and NetBeans and I have to admit I decided to go back to a basic text editor (nano at the time), but having just downloaded NetBeans 6.7.1 it seems to have changed a lot in a few short years! The interface is much more Mac-like and it feels nowhere near as sluggish as it did before. I’m still control-freaky enough to want to start my projects from scratch with absolutely nothing (and TextMate is brilliant for this) but there’s something to be said for an IDE dedicated to the language you’re using.

If you’re a Java developer on Mac what editor or IDE do you use to create your poetic scientific whatnot?

This shows my own ignorance, but did you know the Midnight Commander I talked about recently (If you’ve never tried Midnight Commander…) also comes with it’s own fully featured editor? I’ve been using MC for years and never knew this!

To edit a file with the Midnight Commander editor, invoke it with the e option:

% mc -e [filename]

The key commands are similar to Midnight Commander’s file management mode and are presented along the bottom of the screen, and a convenient bar along the top lets you know the current line and character position of your cursor amongst other things. Hitting [F10] brings up up an easy to use menu system.

I won’t be giving up on my beloved Vim and nano editors any time soon, but using an editor with a blue background, grey text and menus is a nice DOS nostalgia trip!