College of Engineering, Computer Science and Technology
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There are basically three types of editors that could be used for this class.
Word processors are probably the least used editors for computer programming. Word processors are designed to make an author's life easy. They make a programmer's life miserable. Word processor insert special characters into their documents which a compiler would never be able to recognize. If you feel the desire to use a word processor, make sure to use "save as" to save the file as a text only document.
Text editors come in many varieties. Programmers also come in many varieties so I guess this is a good thing. There are basically two divisions of text editors.
Basic text editors - These have little, or no, added special features. Basically they allow you to just enter, edit, save, and retrieve text.
Enhanced (or programmer's) text editors - These editors have a more features which allow programmers to work more efficiently. Some of these features include color syntax highlighting, pretty printing, and auto-indentation.
There are four Unix text editors that we will discuss.
- pico
- vi, and a short tutorial from a online student
- emacs although my (Anne's) favorite, an important note donated from a VI user
- Glimmer
We will also discuss one Windows editor:
And, we will discuss one Windows pretty printer (source code beautifier):
Despite the type of editor you use, all editors have some basic facilities, which include:
- create files
- retrieve files
- delete text
- change text
- move text
- search for text
- SAVE edited text
These tools allow the programmer to have almost all of the functions that make life easier in one integrated program. They include advanced text editors, GUI builders, documentation generators, easy access to the compiler, make tools, source code generation, and in some cases, source code version control. Basically IDEs come in two varieties: free and non-free.
Examples of non-free IDEs are Symantec's Visual Café, Metrowerks' Code Warrior, and the advanced versions of some of the free IDEs.
The free IDEs have become very good and very complex. In the past, Borland released their University Edition of JBuilder 2 and it did not contain any GUI building tools but simply allowed editing of files with colored syntax highlighting and easy access to the compile tools. Now, JBuilder Foundation is a full featured IDE and is available at www.borland.com. Sun Microsystems has stepped into the free IDE arena with their Forté Community Edition. Both JBuilder and Forté are 100% Java applications. This means that they require a Java Virtual Machine to function. IBM has entered the field of free IDEs with their Visual Age for Java.
There are other editors and IDEs out there and you are free to use them but I will not be helping anyone set them up, nor will I be helping you learn them. This is a Java course, not an IDE or editor course. You can find some of them on this Java Resources page.
careful with slashes:
forward (/)on Unix
backward (\)on Microsoftls -F
to distinguish between files and directories (folders) in Unix,
ls -al
to show all files and directories with permissions,
ls -l
to show all files and permissions except for files beginning with a period.
It is a good idea to get used to using the actual Unix machines in OCNL 244, and 136. This will help you immensely as you progress through the program.
