Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

46Chapter 2An Embarrassment of Riches: EditorsThe list of choices for editors is quite long. One of the beauties of theOpen Source approach is that personal choices like favorite editors aren’tsquashed by arbitrary decisions: If you want, you can write an editor; otherscan adopt it.Test drive a few; try them on for size. Remember that there can be alearning curve to climb. Don’t necessarily settle for the easiest to learn—it maynot be able to handle all that you’ll need it to do, which may cost you more inthe long run.Speaking of editors that aren’t easy to learn, we can’t discuss editorswithout a mention of Emacs. To quote the GNU Emacs project home page: 4Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time displayeditor. If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is Emacsis a text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (“elisp,”for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions tosupport text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:• Content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, fromplain text to source code to HTML files.• Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.• Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.• Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the European“Latin” scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai,Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts. (Sorry, Mayanhieroglyphs are not supported.)• A large number of extensions which add other functionality. TheGNU Emacs distribution includes many extensions; many others areavailable separately—even a Web browser.There is another variant of Emacs called XEmacs. It came from the samecode base but split over differences both technical and philosophical. 5 Now ifyou thought that vi had a lot of obscure key sequences, you ain’t seen nothin’yet. With its Lisp interpreter Emacs is incredibly extensible and powerful, but4. This is from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html#Whatis.5. If you want to read more about those differences, and how they came about, seehttp://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html.