[Tutor] Text Editors and Linux (was Re: exit message)

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 6 May 2013 20:54, David Robinow <drobinow at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Those are some of my favourite "Unix as an IDE" features, I'm sure there
>> are others I've missed.
>
> You haven't gone into enough detail for me to tell whether I'm missing
> anything. I'm not understanding what you're saying about grep although I've
> used next-error with C code in emacs.

The grep thing is just one of many examples of how the plethora of
initially mundane seeming programs that every Unix ships with can be
surprisingly powerful when used in combination.

>  I never thought tags were worth the trouble although the tools are
> available on Windows.
>  I should mention that I've been cheating since I use cygwin so I have
> access to most of the "Unix" text tools on Windows.

I won't use Windows without installing some form of bash (usually
git-bash rather than cygwin) and ideally a better graphical terminal
(e.g. console2). Without that, the basic problem is the absolutely
terrible terminal that ships with Windows. I think that alone would be
reason enough to use an IDE for everything.

>  I've never heard of a scripting language that's not available on Windows.

It depends what you mean by available. I expect Unix systems to come
with bash, perl, python, and many more out of the box. Each of these
things can be installed on Windows, just as you can install Windows
versions of grep, awk, sed, vi ... The difference is that Unix just
always has these things without needing to do something as ridiculous
as cygwin.


Oscar