Re: source code editor
On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 03:22:02PM +0100, George Borisov wrote:
> Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
> >
> > If you are learning a new editor, learn vim instead of vi. vim is
> > basically 'vi iMproved'. It is a very nice, powerful and not bloated editor.
> > It has syntax highlighting, folding, ctags support, compile/edit/run support
> > within vim and a lot more.
>
> As tempted as I was to suggest my favourite editor, the OP did ask for
> 'lightest' (as well as 'best'.)
>
> As much as I love vim, at 24MB install (Debian Unstable) it is most
> certainly not light (although it is nice and fast.)
My editor of choice for many years was microemacs, mainly because it
was small, efficient, powerful and most importantly very portable.
Size, efficency and portability were important because I used a lot of
different systems, some of which with very modest specs.
I preferred to know one editor well than have to learn a usable subset
of many editors. I havn't tried it on Debian. The compile I did on BSD
works out to about 500K:
skaro:> ls -l `which umacs`
-r-xr-xr-x 1 digbyt staff 559829 Nov 24 1996 /usr/home/digbyt/bin/umacs
But I think that is with all the options included.
Like full emaces, it takes a few days to train your fingers with all the
control sequences, but once you have it, it is more efficient than modal
editors like vi.
Before that I used a home grown version 'ed' (based on the design in
Plaugers "software tools" book) which required about 4Kb, and had the
advantage of working well on slow dial up connections (300 baud) and
teletypes without cursor addressing.
Since free implementaions of vi have become available, I have tended to
stick to that on Unix systems unless I want to do something exotic like
running complex macros that act on multiple files simultaneously. Vi is
much easier to learn, especially if you are familiar with 'ed' syntax,
but at 24Mb sounds like a heck of a lot of overhead has been added.
Standard 'vi' on my BSD box is:
skaro:/usr/home/digbyt> ls -l `which vi`
-r-xr-xr-x 3 bin bin 225280 Jan 21 1997 /usr/bin/vi
which still seems large to me.
I have never really taken to gnu-emacs, because is it just too darned
big and slow on a lot of the systems I use...
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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