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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Switched

I never thought I’d actually do it, but I’ve switched. Not to one of these (I only wish I could afford it), but to Mandrake 9. The way I figured it I only ever use Windows 98 for browsing the web, editing text files and messing around with Python, so I might as well get stuck in to a more exciting operating system with the same capabilities.

Phoenix on Linux is exactly the same as Phoenix on Windows, and remains an absolute pleasure. My mail is now handled by Evolution, which has been crunching through my six week backlog (don’t ask) on both of my mail accounts with consumate ease, thanks to the excellent filtering. I’ve also been introduced to Dillo, a truly tiny graphical web browser (less than 200KB compiled) which never the less does a great job of rendering table based sites at almost ridiculous speeds. CSS is completely ignored, but CSS sites tend to be perfectly usable without formatting anyway.

The only thing I’m really missing is a good text editor—I’m spoiled for choice, but nothing I’ve played with so far has been half as productive as UltraEdit. I think I need to pick a Unix editor and stick with it until I’ve learnt it inside out, but deciding which one to dedicate myself to is proving difficult.

Posted 29th January 2003 at 2:15 am

This is Switched by Simon Willison, posted on 29th January 2003.

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19 comments

  1. Emacs is The One True Editor. No, wait, Emacs is The One True Operating System. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a very good text editor. That's why I use vi. No, wait... Oh, now I remember: I don't really care. But I guarantee others do. Let the flame wars begin!

    Mark - 29th January 2003 04:41 - #

  2. Heh Emacs!! woot woo... except I can never figure out all those damn keyboard shortcuts. When I use linux, I usually just use gedit cause it has nice tabs (like moz and pheonix!!) and cause I'm too dumb to figure out "advanced" editors :(

    Andy - 29th January 2003 07:00 - #

  3. Of course in the short term (mainly because in the longer term it would just defeat the point of the exercise) you could just see how wine copes with ultraedit to give you something you know while you look.

    Godin - 29th January 2003 09:43 - #

  4. Wine is currently on the list of "things that scare me" - I think I'll leave it for the moment. gedit sounds great - I'll give it a go. Emacs looks like a fun way to put my recent uni course on Lisp to practical use, but I was put off temporarily by the whole frames and buffers thing.

    Simon Willison - 29th January 2003 10:36 - #

  5. All in all WINE isnt that scary, especially if you stick to the prepackaged binaries that distros come with these days (tho I'm still in the "get the tarball" camp on this one), literally as hard as typing "wine whatever.exe" in a shell

    Godin - 29th January 2003 11:02 - #

  6. I recently made the same switch and discovered JEdit - I noticed it in a recent LinuxFormat where it was selected as the best text editor. With the plugins it becomes so much more! It even has an excellent CVS plugin! www.jedit.org

    Jon - 29th January 2003 11:14 - #

  7. i switched to mandrake 9 not long ago as well. as a text editor i'm still having a love hate relationship. i switch between gedit, bluefish and html-kit running in wine.

    dean - 29th January 2003 11:16 - #

  8. Good luck! I'm thinking of switching to Xandros soon...

    Olly - 29th January 2003 11:22 - #

  9. Simon: Why did you think you'd never do it?

    Joe Grossberg - 29th January 2003 16:53 - #

  10. I'd recommend at least acquainting yourself with vi, if only because it's near-ubiquitous in Unixdom, and Emacs isn't. Familiarity with vi might come in handy if you have to use Solaris for a job, for example.

    jacob - 29th January 2003 17:45 - #

  11. Add me to the "thumbs up for jEdit" list... Customizable as can be!

    Pete Prodoehl - 29th January 2003 18:26 - #

  12. Try kate, it comes with KDE as standard (3.1 has just been released). Also available for web editing is quanta, also released with KDE 3.1.

    Jim - 29th January 2003 22:10 - #

  13. Joe: I've always been put off Linux by the inconstencies in the GUIs (mainly copy and paste problems), but I've decided that the benefits far outweigh any minor issues like that. I've been playing with Quanta and it's pretty nice - the closest thing I've seen to UltraEdit at any rate. Kate's pretty funky as well - I think it will end up being my notepad substitute. I haven't dared get stuck in to Java on Linux just yet but when I do I'll be sure to give jEdit a go. Thanks for all the advice :)

    Simon Willison - 29th January 2003 23:27 - #

  14. Pretty much everything I use for development is java based now. jEdit, jCVS (although the CVS plugin I mentioned is growing on me) and Aqua Data Studio to name a few. Running Java apps on the Linux operating system is not as hard as I first thought... quite disappointed really - the geek in me needed to solve the problems ;)

    Jon - 30th January 2003 14:28 - #

  15. A few good editors I've come across that I haven't seen mentioned here yet are Nedit (http://www.nedit.org/) and Anjuta (http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/). Nedit was probably the closest to my favourite editor (BBEdit, Mac OS only, sorry!) in terms of functionality and behaviour. It's a little strange at first because it uses Motif as its GUI toolkit, which doesn't necessarily look or behave like the rest of your desktop (assuming you're running KDE or Gnome). Still, it's my #1 choice when I'm not on my Mac.

    Lux - 31st January 2003 19:28 - #

  16. A couple of people have mentioned vi, but no one has plugged Vim yet. Besides being an absolutely incredible editor, Vim is one of the most impressive crossplatform open source projects out there. Yes, it's cryptic to begin with, but once you know the basics you find it's so consistent that you keep discovering functionality where you expect to find it. http://www.vim.org

    Jean Jordaan - 2nd February 2003 08:52 - #

  17. Like others have mentioned, it helps being familiar with vi. SlickEdit is a great editor for programmers available on linux, Windows, and other systems. But spendy. Also check out eclipse. Not sure if there is a php plug-in however.

    Brad Smith - 2nd February 2003 23:53 - #

  18. I'll second the vim recommendation. Once you learn a modal editor, everything else feels like an HTML textarea. Some of the cool things VIM can do: * Open the same file twice in the same window, (called 'folding') viewing different parts of the file at the same time and keeping both copies "live" ("What was the order of the arguments to that function again?") * Syntax highlighting, of course * Opening multiple files in the same view area (called "splitting") IMO, this is better than a tabbed MDA because you can see all of the files at the same time. * All of the power of VI (regex, movement keys/commands (Never hit the cursor keys nor the scroll bar again!)) There's a small(!) learning curve at the beginning, but it pays for itself SO quickly... you'll never regret learning vi(m).

    Sam - 4th February 2003 13:52 - #

  19. Learn VI. or VIM, which is fancier. I made myself do it after the third time I got stuck facing a screen full of tildes, (er because I was fond of saying "edit somefile" and expecting pico) and I have never looked back. I have one of those (a powerbook) and use vi in the terminal all day long.

    um and uh - 19th July 2004 18:43 - #

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