<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:20 AM, Daniel Taylor <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:random@argle.org">random@argle.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
For those who do not know.<br>
<br>
Before there was vi there were ed (the line editor) and sed (the stream<br>
editor).<br>
<br>
In the days of paper terminals ed was the ultimate interactive text<br>
editor, you could (in theory) write your thesis using it. I'm sure<br>
someone did, because college students are That Way (that, and you could<br>
save a backup copy and pay someone with a nice typewriter and decent<br>
typing speed to make it pretty for you if you had more money than most<br>
college students).<font color="#888888"><a href="http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list" target="_blank"></a></font></blockquote><div><br>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. :)<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>-Rob <br></div></div><br>