Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

2.3 Editors Galore47has a huge learning curve—which is why we aren’t going to cover Emacs orXEmacs at all in this book.Our favorite editor is still vi—in part, we’re sure, because we already knowit so well. But like any skilled craftsman, even though you may have a favoritehammer or saw that you use on most of your work, you will still have severalothers ready in your toolkit, and use specialized ones for certain tasks.2.3.1 Editing Your Pipes (sed, the Stream EDitor)One important kind of editor available on Linux is the stream editor, or sed. Itallows you to perform editing on the data that comes in on standard in andwrites its result to standard out. Similar to the syntax from ex mode in vi (andbased on the simple ed editor), it can be very useful for making changes to largenumbers of files in one go.You can learn much more about sed from its manpage or from the bookUNIX AWK and SED Programmer’s Interactive Workbook by Peter Patsis.2.3.2 Simple Graphical EditorsLinux comes with a wide range of open source software, not all of which is installedon every installation. You may need to use your Linux installation disksto add these programs to your system. Whether it’s RedHat’s package manageror SuSE’s YaST2 or Debian’s apt-get, most Linux admin interfaces make iteasy to add these extra packages. Of course you can also resort to the Web forfinding and downloading additional open source software.Here’s a quick listing of some of the many editors that you might find toyour liking. The description of each is largely “in its own words,” based on thetext that the authors supply with their software.• jedit is a cross-platform programmer’s text editor written in Java. TheJava-based portability seems appealing. This is a very powerful editor anda popular choice.• pico is a small easy to use editor.• mbedit is a multiplatform editor.• NEdit is a GUI style text editor for workstations with X Window andMotif. NEdit provides all of the standard menu, dialog, editing, mousesupport, as well as macro extension language, syntax highlighting, and alot of other nice features (and extensions for programmers).