ya, ssb not working is a recent tragedy. I'll let y'all know when it is back up and running.

I actually really, really hated jEdit. It was slow, took five minutes to start up, and wasn't really *that* flash in comparison to BBEdit/TextWrangler. Also the Swing widget set is fantastically ugly. I remember thinking the only possible benefit of jEdit was cross-platform use. Have i mentioned that BBEdit makes angels sing and champagne fall from the heavens?

Oh, and for me installing the Sun JRE on ubuntu was relatively painless, though the download cost me arms and legs through my university's internet billing racket ($22/gb? come on!!) A simple wget + dpkg -i and I was running java

The syntax highlighting in jEdit was infinitely better than TextWrangler, so I went with it.  I like the plugins better, too.  TextWrangler's simple, but I needed something cross-platform.

My java install was relatively painful, unfortunately.  Getting the right packages installed was no problem.  Ubuntu, however, decides to put things in a very atypical place which require some significant mucking around in config files to get it where it was usable.

My favourite quote about java;
http://bash.org/?338364

  Very funny (but glad you didn't paste it here ).

I agree regarding JAVA.  Unfortunately a large portion of the scientific software needed for my experiments is written in JAVA, even though they're only publishing the programs for Windows.  JAVA's speed issues can be very annoying, certainly.

However, it's got its uses.  I don't recommend software lightly, and jEdit's feature set has got me converted.  The ability to evaluate BeanShell scripts or calculations within a document is handy, and the SideKick and XML browsing features make folded editing of XHTML and CSS very navigable.  For me, it works, and works well.  True, it can take a while to start-up, but I cannot easily get any other text-editor with the same feature set (features I use regularly and depend on) that works on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, the three OSs I use daily.

I do use TextWrangler for simple tasks, like copying and pasting genomic code for other applications.  It's got some nice features, the case-changing is much easier, for instance, than jEdit.  Comes in handy for cloning projects.  But for scenarios where syntax-highlighting is handy, I still stick to jEdit.

Have you ever used MATLAB? It's one of those languages they use/teach in the engineering dept of my uni, mainly because it's easy to write and has a good GUI-generation wizard for the programatically impaired Unfortunately, the interpreter/IDE is written in JAVA and runs in it's own sandbox, so regardless of how much RAM you have it seems to cap out at about 256MB or so. Very annoying when you're parsing a 2mb list of country -> IP range mappings and suddenly the entire things begins to throw java errors all over because it's run out of memory in it's sandbox, even though you're using a machine with 2gb of ram Also makes me sad in the pants when the IDE needs all of the ram Windows isn't using just to start up...

At least MATLAB supposedly installs on Linux There's supposed to be a shell script on the first CD that acts like an installer, but of course I don't have a copy of MATLAB to try it with. (cough! cough!)

Textwrangler/BBEdit were my favourites because of their features w.r.t. regular expressions... at the time, I needed to do a perl regular expression search-and-replace on an entire hierarchy of text files (so that i could strip all the ads and sidebars and stuff from webpages i'd downloaded using wget -r) - BBEdit did it like magic At the time, it seemed like the utterly perfect tool for text edting. (KATE does this too, actually, and you can even edit regular expressions using a gui-like thing called kregexpeditor, which helps ensure that your regular expression actually does what you meant, not what you think it meant. :p)

Note : Even if you don't use textwrangler much, you should read the section of the manual about grep/perl regexps - it's the best written introduction to PCRE's i've ever read, and if you've ever had a reason to process wads and wads of text you'll immediately see loads of uses grep for the win!

I might download a new version of jEdit and see if it's gotten better in the last year or so. I agree that it's possibly *the* most featureful text editor in existence today, but... java? Can I stand to be near the embodiment of human sin for that long? :p

I haven't tried MatLab, although a few of my doctoral friends in the physics department swear by it.  I never knew it was written in JAVA   Very interesting!  I have to use one program on a fluorimeter and another on a western-blot analyzer that are both written in JAVA.  Both are not exactly the most responsive pieces of software, but they get the job done.

You got me really investigating TextWrangler.  I've used it for approximately a year for smaller stuff (note-taking, genomic code browsing for FASTA files, etc).  Only recently, however, have I given it a shot for XHTML/CSS.  Y'know what?  It's SNAPPY!  You're absolutely right that its searching and regular expression searches are well done.  That would make my genome browsing so much easier, too.  I'll definitely be investigating this one more - the speed advantage is worth it.

jEdit's still a great choice, but I realize it's not for everyone.  I'm not going to pressure you into changing text-editors if you've got something that works fantastic for you.  Incidentally I tried messing around with AquaEmacs on the mac.  I've attempted to use Emacs or XEmacs under Linux before but had the hardest time navigating the thing.  EXTREMELY POWERFUL, but I just can't get used to it.  Another one that comes highly recommended to me all the time is Vim, although I can never even figure out how to exit the thing, unfortunately.  It seems to have a bigger following that Emacs, without the bloat that Emacs brings.

For my command-line editing, I generally just use Nano - does syntax-highlighting and is simple enough that I can figure it out.  Good, quick, light terminal editor for small jobs.

Thanks for the rec on the GREP info, too.  GREP is one of those things I've tried to learn many times but never been able to mentally parse.  This documentation is actually understandable to me and instructive.  I think this is the time to learn it

Just so y'all know, http://foon.co.uk/farcade/ssb/ is now up and running, so go there if you want to have some fun.

> jEdit's still a great choice, but I realize it's not for everyone.

It's always about choice You use the best tool for the job, and that's the end of it - though at times, the maxim 'all tools can be used as hammers' applies

Nano does syntax highlighting?!?! I must investigate this at once. I thought nano/pico were basically the 'notepads' of the CLI world that just you just used to dump out text to a terminal

I seem to remember the surefire way of exiting vi to be <esc> (to drop you out of whatever mode you're in), :!q. There should be a thing called 'vimtutor' or 'vitutor' on whatever machine you're using (my iBook has it) which explains vi(m) in great detail, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

Finally, something funny : 'Richard Stallman's inspiration for Emacs' - http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/images/wenger_264.jpg

EDIT : HOLY CRAP!! That knife is actually *real*!!
http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/photogallery/article/0,20036,1145812_1304110,00.html
http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/photogallery/article/0,20036,1145811_1304110,00.html

Nice. What were they thinking? "Here you go. Here's a $1,200 knife that you will never use. Oh ya, and you know how the ends don't quite fit together, that's because we stuffed this baby full of 85 random tools that even the swiss army couldn't use." I have to say, I want one though. XD

Hi, I'm mrbiotech, and I'm a super-serif brothers game addict...

Now THAT'S a knife!\

Re: Nano... I'm on the wife's PC right now, but I'll try and get the .nanorc file up here in the forums that has all my syntax highlighting presets.  I've got some in there for HTML, CSS, PHP, and Ruby.  I was also surprised that a terminal-based editor that small could do that, too! 

Thanks for the tips on "vimtutor" - that will come in very handy.  Most of the tutorials online for Ruby, Rails, and modding .htaccess all use vim but I could never figure it out.  This will be of great help

Nice, what level are you on?

Have you read through the list of tools on that thing? GOLF CLUB FACE CLEANER is my favourite, but 'telescopic pointer' is darned amusing too :p

I wonder how one would wield that telescopic pointer?