# Looking for a good light IDE...



## HateEternal (Mar 22, 2004)

I know there are a ton of posts about this stuff, but what I really am looking for is a ligthweight fast text editor that has Syntax coloring, bracket indentation and plugins for compiling and running Java.

So far i have tried jEdit, xCode and NetBeans. I dont really care much for any of them, jEdit is probably the closest to what I want out of them but it is kind of slow and that annoys me. xCode i never quite figured out the targets the way i wanted them to work out. The programs I am writing are only like 10 class programs and i dont want to compile an .app everytime i compile... if someone told me the best way to do a target ill use xcode because it is pretty nice other than the compiling. NetBeans... It tries to do too much, i want something simple and it runs so slow because its written in java. I dont like how classes have to belong in a package for it to recognize other classes that are used as objects.

On my PC i used a program called textpad (www.textpad.com) it is really simple, yet has a lot of good features and is extremely fast.


Thanks


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## frdumlao (Mar 22, 2004)

If you liked TextPad you'll LOVE BBEdit! This is what you are looking for:

http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml


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## naodx (Mar 22, 2004)

Well I have to put my vote in for VIM!!!! (command line version) 

It can seem a little hard to learn at fist, but once you master the basics, you can do some very amazing editing!!!!!!!


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## frdumlao (Mar 22, 2004)

Thats true, VIM and VI are VERY well suited for coding, just about any language I can think of, but if youre used to the GUI VIM will seem very terse at first.


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## HateEternal (Mar 22, 2004)

VIM is good i have used it in the past... is there any way to to get colors in terminal, on my linux box vi does syntax coloring and stuff which is always helpful.

However i was looking for something with a document selector because god that really comes in handy to have that on the side when my little brain forgets methods and data field names 

BBedit is alright, i need to figure out a script that will compile the class i am working on. With text pad i just hit ctrl + 1 to compile and ctrl + 2 to run, its so fast it really helps when i make stupid mistakes.


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## Viro (Mar 22, 2004)

Create a file called .vimrc in your home directory. In it, add the following lines

set autoindent
syntax on
set showcmd
set tabstop=2


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## HateEternal (Mar 23, 2004)

exellent. 

Ill try and get the rest of what i need to know from their website.


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## naodx (Mar 23, 2004)

In your .vimrc file add the following two lines. (found these on the net)

set makeprg=javac\ % 
set errorformat=%A%f:%l:\ %m,%-Z%p^,%-C%.%#

Now if you plan on using vim for other type of programming, like c or cpp, where you can use :make inside of vim I suggest the following:

au FileType java set  makeprg=javac\ %
au FileType java set errorformat=%A%f:%l:\ %m,%-Z%p^,%-C%.%#

This will make it so that when you type make with a java file it will use the java compiler, but will allow vim to use gcc for c or cpp programs.

VIM is really cool!!!!


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## HateEternal (Mar 23, 2004)

It is really cool, thanks for the help guys. This is exactly what i was looking for.


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