Skip to content

Development Environment / Text Editor

The Eclipse/Photran IDE is one option for editing code and performing other development tasks. However, some developers may prefer to avoid Eclipse and instead use a test editor and the command-line compiler. Text editors are also useful in general for some operations. The StateCU development environment is configured to accommodate both options. Text editors that are known to be used with StateCU are discussed below.

Prerequisites

Text editors don't typically have prerequisites although some may have a cost.

General Considerations

Text editors are generally comparable for basic features. The following are important considerations:

  1. Does the editor automatically detect line ending character (Windows or Linux) and use that convention when adding new lines. Most editors handle this and may show an indicator for the line ending type. It is important that a file, when saved, has consistent line endings so as to not confuse editors, compilers, Git, and other tools.
  2. Does the editor use tabs or spaces for indentation. Ideally it can be configured to display tabs. Spaces should be used in code if possible because tab spacing may vary between developers and tools. Otherwise, formatting issues may arise.
  3. Some editors create temporary and backup files. These files need to be ignored using Git .gitignore file so as to not commit to the repository.
  4. Many editors include spell checkers. Avoiding typos and misspelled words in code is desirable.

Known Text Editors and Issues

The following are text editors that are known to have been used with StateCU development or are likely to be used.

Atom

The GitHub Atom editor can be used to edit files and is particularly useful because it has a built-in Markdown file viewer (use Ctrl-Shift-m to open the Markdown viewer for a file).

Notepad

The Windows notepad editor has limitations and should not typically be used as text editor for coding.

Notepad++ ("notepad plus-plus")

The Notepad++ editor is a good general purpose text editor. The following are useful Notepad++ features:

  • use the View / Show Symbol / Show End of Line menu to toggle the display of end of line character, useful to determine whether Windows or Linux end of line is being used

Sublime

The Sublime editor is a full-featured editor used by many programmers.

UltraEdit

The UltraEdit editor has been used by the developer in the past.

vim

The vim editor is widely available on many operating systems and is available by default in Git Bash. A visual version of vim is available and keyboard driven version is available by default on many systems. The following are useful vim features:

  • use vim -b to check for ^M end of line, indicating Windows-style line endings
  • vim can be also be configured via its ~/.vimrc file to clearly show when tabs are used in files:
" Displays tabs as >-, where first character indicates tab and following - fill in tab space
" see:  https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/422/displaying-tabs-as-characters
set list
set listchars=tab:>-

Visual Studio Code

The Visual Studio Code editor is useful for editing Markdown files because it provides a documentation preview.

Other Editors

Other text editors can also be used and are a preference of the software developer. See the General Considerations.