I've always used TextWrangler/ Notepad++ to develop websites from scratch. I'm now coding what I'd say are very advanced websites this way.
I want to know if it's efficient to do things this way and whether I should learn DreamWeaver and use that
I use Dreamweaver, basically because I'm a designer not a coder. I find it useful to use Dreamweaver, because it has all the tools you need to create a website. Dreamweaver has the ability to be a WYSIWYG in the "Design" mode, but you can easily switch to the raw code and mess about with the code. Which is what I tend to do anyway.
Dreamweaver isn't a cheat way of web design, it is a tool. Much like a pencil and paper would be to an artist, or a hammer to a joiner. It's not what is used to create a website that should be ridiculed or the designer who uses Dreamweaver should be abused. But in fact the website itself, and the application of web design skills/knowledge.
Dreamweaver has it's own project file system, so you know exactly what is in your project and what isn't. You can also see all the external files that are linked in one HTML file, such as a JavaScript file. You can swap between the source code of the HTML file and the external file source code, with one click and with no other open "windows".
Dreamweaver is quite easy to learn (in my opinion), and should at least have a fair trial run.
If I were you, I would download a trial version of Dreamweaver, and try it out.
I hope I've helped in some way.
There are code editors with assists that are far better than DreamWeaver, like Espresso, Brackets or the upcoming TweakStyle.
Each software have a different added value depending on what you're searching for.
I want to create a desktop mockup on Elementary OS 0.2. By "mockup" I mean something that shows off the aesthetic of the mockup, mostly just showing what selecting/clicking/hovering over a button or widget does to that particular part of the UI. I'm thinking about creating the various parts on GIMP and coding animation and transition logic into the final result. I know that something like this can be done in HTML/JS, but I want to avoid using those. Is there anything optimized for a project like this? I'm open to most languages.
Try WireframeSketcher wireframing tool. Unlike Gimp or PowerPoint, WireframeSketcher is designed specifically to help you create mockups and wireframes. It comes pre-packaged for Debian systems and can also be found in Software Center and so it works on Elementary OS too. Note that it's a commercial tool, but you can try it freely for 14 days.
Most PMs at large companies mock these things up using a presentation package like PowerPoint. If you know the routine and where to click it can look fantastic with minimal effort.
MockupUI does both wireframe and Windows native looking mockups. It uses your desktop's visual style which makes screens and widgets look as a standard Windows application. MockupUI lets you export screens as individual images, docx, pdf or html.
Actions/interactions can be explained by highlighting widgets and adding text annotations.
I'm looking a tool that will display details of syntax errors in my code as I'm typing it, in the same way that Visual Studio does. I'm currently using Gedit, but am not adverse to acquiring a new text editor. I'm using C++ and HTML/CSS right now, but will be branching out to more languages in the future, so it needs to have support for as many languages as possible. I'd also like to avoid using an IDE as I feel more productive using a text editor and the GNU toolchain. Any suggestions?
You will likely have difficulty finding a simple one-file editor that can do this. An IDE is virtually a necessity, since it integrates with a compiler to detect errors/warnings.
If you use an IDE (and I would recommend Eclipse or maybe KDevelop), you can continue to use the GNU toolchain; you don't need to build your project from the IDE if you don't want to. I regularly use Eclipse for programming and then Ant or Make in a terminal for building.
How about Eclipse?
vim does syntax highlighting well. As far as I know, however, it doesn't have the ability to display the details of the syntax errors in the editor. The constant "hands on keyboard" does speed up programming, though.
vim with the pyflakes plugin does this for python, but I don't know about other languages.
We're going to be building some J2ME apps and Java/Rails webapps which will have a Kannada(a south indian language, for those who don't know much about India) UI. The UI and the data will both be in Kannada for these apps.
So, we will need to write code containing some of these language text in the source code. I find it irritating that neither emacs nor XEmacs OR Jedit can edit any of these languages :-(
Someone mentioned that a variant of Emacs can do it except I don't know if it works on Windows and where to get hold of it.
I know notepad can do the trick BUT it's not a programmer's editor.
P.S : I am an EMacs guy but will be open to using other programmer editors.
P.P.S : This should work on Windows Vista/Windows 7. I wouldn't mind using VirtualBox or VMWare to boot into Linux to use an Linux Editor, if that is the only option I have!
So, we will need to write code containing some of these language text in the source code.
I think any Windows editor that supports UTF-8 will be able to do this. There should be plenty to choose from.
I'm the as the author of the Zeus editor and just recently UTF-8 support was added so I would expect Zeus should be able to do exactly this. But if it doesn't feel free to report a bug on the Zeus forum.
P.S : I am an EMacs guy but open to using other programmer editors in this situation.
Zeus has a Emacs keyboard emulation mode ;)
Considering it's Java you're using: Have you tried Eclipse? I know it's not an editor and might be a little overkill when one is used to Emacs, but it uses SWT which in turn uses the OS's native font rendering. And at least my browser shows that the Uniscribe can display Kannada just fine.
Another option might be Notepad++.
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Let me preface this question by saying I use TextMate on Mac OSX for my text needs and I am in love with it. Anything comparable on the Linux platform? I'll mostly use it for coding python/ruby.
Doing a google search yielded outdated answers.
Edit: Since there has been some concern about the 'merit' of this question. I am about to start a new Ruby Programming Project in Linux and before I got started I wanted to make sure I had the right tools to do the job.
Edit #2: I use VIM on a daily basis -- all . the . time. I enjoy using it. I was just looking for some alternatives.
http://xkcd.com/378/
Emacs is a wonderful text editor. It has huge power once you become a power user. You can access a shell, have as many files open as you want in as many sub-windows and an extremely powerful scripting support that lets you add all kinds of neat features.
I have been using a ruby-mode which adds syntax highlighting and whatnot to ruby, and the same exists for every major language.
If you keep at it, you can use exclusively the keyboard and never touch the mouse, which increases your editing speed by a significant margin.
If you want to start with something a lot more basic though, gedit is nice... it has built in syntax highlighting as well for most languages based on the filename extension. It comes with the OS as well (though emacs you can easily install with apt-get or some similar package finder utility).
UPDATE: I think gedit is exclusively GUI based though, so it would be useful to learn emacs in case you are stuck with just a shell (it is fully featured in both shell and graphical mode).
FURTHER UPDATE: Just FYI, I am not trying to push Emacs over Vim, it's just what I use, and it's a great editor (as I'm sure Vim is too). It is daunting at first (as I'm sure Vim is too), but the question was about text editors on Linux besides vi... Emacs seems the logical choice to me, but gedit is a great simple text editor with some nice features if that's all you are looking for.
Kate, the KDE Advanced Text Editor is quite good. It has syntax highlighting, block selection mode, terminal/console, sessions, window splitting both horizontal and vertical etc.
I use sublime Text on linux.
Try Scribes . It tries to be a TextMate replacement for Linux
2020 edit: forgotten in the mists of history
I use SciTE
very small and simple text editor.
I like the versatility of jEdit (http://www.jedit.org), its got a lot of plugins, crossplatform and has also stuff like block selection which I use all the time.
The downside is, because it is written in java, it is not the fastest one.
I find Geany (http://geany.uvena.de/) quite good.
I use pico or nano as my "casual" text editor in Linux/Solaris/etc. It's easy to come to grips with, and whilst you lose a couple of rows of text to the menu, at least it's easy to see how to exit, etc.
You can even extend nano, I think, and add syntax highlighting.
Alternative text editors? Try Diakonos, "a Linux editor for the masses". The default keyboard mapping is as expected for cut, copy, paste, undo, open, save, etc.
When I searched for TextMate alternative for Linux, I ended up using Geany. It's not as powerfull, but still nice to work with. Great replacement for Kate.
On Mac OS X, I have used BBEdit since the early 1990's, so I use that as my reference for all other editors. I sometimes use BBEdit to edit files on a Linux box using ftp mode, and that works very well if you have a fast network connection to the Linux box.
I learned emacs two years ago because the rest of the programming team I joined uses it. I find emacs powerful but annoyingly old-fashioned in many ways, but once you have learned emacs, you can use it on any platform (Linux, OS X, Windows). This is the editor I use almost exclusively at work now. It is going to take me years to master all its features, though.
I have also used gedit on Linux and found it very usable, but I haven't tried to use it as my primary editor for any project.
I have a colleague at work who uses Komodo Edit 4.4 (free from activestate.com), running it on a Windows computer but using it in ftp mode so she can edit files on our Linux server. Komodo Edit has many nice features, but it takes a looonnnggg time to launch the first time.
Don't forget NEdit! Small and light, but with syntax highlighting and macro record/replay.
Best one besides Vi? Vim.
SciTE
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
The best I've found is gedit unfortunately. Spend a few hours with it and you'll discover it's not so bad, with plugins and themes. You can use the command line to open documents in it.
+1 for pico/nano -- lightweight, gets the job done, good help
Friend of mine swears by jed, http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
First I don't want to start a war..
I haven't used TextMate but I have used its Windows equivalent, e-TextEditor and I could understand why people love it.
I've also tried many text editors and IDEs in my quest in finding the perfect text editor on Linux. I've tried jEdit, vim, emacs (although I used to love when I was at uni) and various others.
On Linux I've settled with gEdit. Although I do use Komodo Edit from time to time. When I'm in a hurry I use gEdit purely because it is quicker than Komodo Edit.
gEdit has plenty of plugins and comes with some nice colour schemes. I reckon once gEdit has a proper code-tidy facility it'll be cool.
I think the only reason I use Komodo Edit is the project file facility.
I have a friend who donated his 'Vi Improved' book in the hope that he can convert me to Vim. The book is over an inch thick and completely put me off in investing time in learning Vim..
Everytime I find an editor - I always find myself going back to gEdit. It is a frills-in-the-right-places editor. Give gEdit a go, it is the default text editor in Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
Here is a link to an excellent guide on how to get gEdit to look and behave (somewhat) like TextMate:
http://grigio.org/pimp_my_gedit_was_textmate_linux
Hope that helps.
I agree with Mike, though I'm a Vim die-hard. I've been using GEdit quite frequently lately when I'm doing lightweight Ruby scripting. The standard editor (plus Ruby code snippets) is extremely usable and polished, and can provide a nice reprieve from full-strength, always-on programming editors.
I've just started using OSX. Free editors of note that I've discovered:
Komodo by ActiveState. No debugger or regex editor (although one comes with Python, i.e. redemo.py) in free version but perfectly usable.
ERIC, written in PyQT.
Eclipse with PyDev is my preferred option for editing Python on all platforms. Nice clean GUI, decent debugger. Good syntax parsing etc.
I've used Emacs for 20 years. It's great and it works everywhere. I also have TextMate, which I use for some things on the Mac (HTML mode is great). If you want to do Ruby development, Netbeans supports Ruby and it also runs on all platforms.
http://www.netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html
I've seen some blogs, etc claiming that it's the best Ruby environment available.
I use joe for simple (and not so simple) editing when I'm away from Eclipse.
It uses the classic Wordstar keybindings- although I've never used Wordstar, it's a selling point for many people.
It's easy, well-supported, light-weight and it has binaries available for everything.
I love Kate because it has several interesting features (already cited) usually found in (heavier) IDEs. My favorite feature, however, is its terminal window that is very practical for quickly performing the save-compile-execute combo.
Nedit is another valid option, packed with lots of features (and it hasn't lots of dependencies: that's a huge plus IMHO).
For editing in a shell, when I cannot use VIM, I look immediately for pico or nano (but I would not recommend them for continuous development: for rapid editing they are perfect).
If it's just you? Use what you want to use today; switch in mid-stream if you want.
Is it a team? Try to be editor-agnostic. Set standards for white-space (are tabs allowed? How many spaces does a tab represent?), but otherwise allow anyone to use whichever editor they want.
Is it a team doing pair-programming? That's where you may need a team-standard editor, just so that programmers can easily pass the keyboard.
To help implement a standard white-space policy in a shop where one or more coders is using Emacs: You can tell Emacs about your white-space policy with some comments stuck at the bottom of every file source file. For example,
# Local Variables:
# tab-width: 2
# ruby-indent-level: 2
# indent-tabs-mode: nil
# End:
Anyone using emacs (or xemacs) on that file will automatically get the group standard indentation.
Sublime Text 2 is my favorite.
Intuitively understandable and quite powerful.
You can try Emacs with ruby-mode, Rinari (for Rails) and yasnippet which provides automatic snippets like Textmate.
TextMate is a great editor, and there is a way to replicate some of the functionality in GEdit. Check the article out here: http://rubymm.blogspot.com/2007/08/make-gedit-behave-roughly-like-textmate.html to modify GEdit to behave like TextMate.
Vim is a nice upgrade for Vi, offering decent features and a more usable set of keybindings and default behaviour. However, graphical versions like GVim, KVim and even Cream are extremely lacking in my opinion. I've been using Geany a lot lately, but it also has its shortcomings.
I just can't find something in the league of Programmers Notepad, Smultron or TextMate on Linux. A shame, since I want to live in an all open source cyberworld, I'm stuck hopping from one almost-right editor to another.
I personally use MacVim which is basically a GVim for Mac OSx. However I have been reading alot about Redcar, which is a text editor for Linux, which shares a lot of the Textmate functionality. Checkout the links below.
Redcar
LURG Lecture on Redcar