Scribes ~ a new Programming Editor

In the beginning

I began programming using Notepad for Windows, as this is what we were told to do in 1999. The advantage of the notepad + command line approach, I believe, is that you are under no illusions about what code is. It's text. This is, in my opinion a danger about starting programmers on IDEs. Some students believe that code doesn't exist outside of Gel/Eclipse/VS. Charles Petzold claims this phenomena re-appears later on in life, in his article "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?". But anyways, I started in Notepad, and then 2 years later Vishal showed me Context.

Context was a total revelation to me, I couldn't believe code could be colored to emphasis the difference between different parts of it. I was shocked to find that you could edit 2 files with one window (My first non-Excel introduction to Tabs). You could even map keys to perform different functions (e.g. compile, run, javadoc, jar). Context was my favourite programming editor until I began a PhD in late 2003. At that point I saw features that I wanted that Context didn't have. Support for Versioning Systems (e.g. a svn plugin), Auto indentation of code, Class viewer etc. So I went looking again, and found jEdit

jEdit is a great editor, but its just too slow. It's the first editor I used that needed a splash screen, and even then the start up time is awful and the memory footprint is larger than anything I run on my gnome desktop (minus evolution, of course). But like all well written open source projects it has a plugin architecture that makes it all things to all people. I could pretty much get all the features I wanted, remove all the features I didn't want, and voila. jEdit is a very good editor. I spent 2 years alternating between jEdit and gEdit, jEdit is slow but featureful, gEdit is fast but feature-less. Then I saw Dave using textmate, and I liked it.

Textmate is a commercial Mac Only text editor that gets the hell out of your way, and automates all the crap you don't like doing. All of it. So off I went looking for a clone, there is none. Two days ago whilst browsing Planet Gnome I saw something called Scribes. Scribes is a Linux only editor that seems also to get the hell out of your way and let you work. So I'm using Scribes and the moment, and here is an example of how quickly you can do things in it, once you spent 10 minutes configuring it. My scribes demo Warning this link will take you to a 1.4 meg gif file, created using Byzanz, a great desktop recorder. Have a look at scribes, its a programming Editor written in Python for the Gnome desktop. It's at a very early stage of production, but it looks like it will be excellent.

So my favourite editor at the moment is definitely Scribes, but as you can see, its likely to change again in another 2 years. Many months ago I asked all the Minds members what editors they use, and the number one choice was vi. I personally can't get "into" emacs or vi but for some reason I actually learned all the keyboards shortcuts for nano.

Stuff mentioned in this post

• Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Charles Petzold
• Context Programming Editor (Free as in Beer, Windows Only, written in Delphi)
• jEdit An open source programming editor written in Java
• Scribes An open source programming editor written in Python for the Gnome desktop

Unrelated Links

• Searchable TV listings for Irish Television presented in a clear manner. A very handy website, written by Micheál
• Dublin Journey Planner If you're in one place in Dublin, and need to get somewhere else then this page will help