TOPIC: NEDIT
A look at Emacs
10th August 2010It's remarkable what work can bring your way in terms of technology. For me, (GNU) Emacs Has proved to be such a thing recently. It may have been around since 1975, long before my adventures in computing ever started, in fact, but I am asking myself why I never really have used it much. There are vague recollections of my being aware of its existence in the early days of my using UNIX over a decade ago. Was it a shortcut card with loads of seemingly esoteric keyboard shortcuts and commands that put me off it back then? The truth may have been that I got bedazzled with the world of Microsoft Windows instead, and so began a distraction that lingered until very recently. As unlikely as it looks now, Word and Office would have been part of the allure of what some consider as the dark side these days. O how OpenOffice.org and their ilk have changed that state of affairs...
The unfortunate part of the Emacs story might be that its innovations were never taken up as conventions by mainstream computing. If its counterparts elsewhere used the same keyboard shortcuts, it would feel like learning such an unfamiliar tool. Still, it's not as if there isn't logic behind it because it will work both in a terminal session (where I may have met it for the first time) and a desktop application GUI. The latter is the easier to learn, and the menus list equivalent keyboard shortcuts for many of their entries, too. For a fuller experience though, I can recommend the online manual, and you can buy it in paper form too if you prefer.
One thing that I discovered recently is that external factors can sour the impressions of a piece of software. For instance, I was using a UNIX session where the keyboard mapping wasn't optimal. There's nothing like an unfamiliar behaviour for throwing you off track because you feel that your usual habits are being obstructed. For instance, finding that a Backspace key is behaving like a Delete one is such an obstruction. It wasn't the fault of Emacs, and I have found that using Ctrl+K (C-k in the documentation) to delete whole lines is invaluable.
Apart from keyboard mapping niggles, Emacs has to be respected as a powerful piece of software in its own right. It may not have the syntax highlighting capabilities of some, like gedit or NEdit for instance, but I have a hunch that a spot of Lisp programming would address that need. What you get instead is support for version control systems like RCS or CVS, along with integration with GDB for debugging programs written in a number of languages. Then, there are features like file management, email handling, newsgroup browsing, a calendar and a calculator that make you wonder if they tried to turn a text editor into something like an operating system. With Google trying to use Chrome as the basis of one, it almost feels as is Emacs was ahead of its time, though that may have been more due to its needing to work within a UNIX shell in those far-off pre-GUI days. It really is saying something that it has stood the test of time when so much has fallen by the wayside. Like Vi, it looks as if the esteemable piece of software is showing no signs of going away just yet. Maybe it was well-designed in the beginning, and the thing certainly seems more than a text editor with its extras. Well, it has to offer a good reason for making its way into Linux too...
A UNIX shell running on Windows
15th November 2007Here's an idea that I got for a post before I spent that torrid weekend with Windows that caused me to jump ship to Linux. The idea of having a UNIX command line while still remaining on Windows did appeal to me at the time, and Cygwin seems to provide an intriguing way to do this. At its most basic, it is a set of DLL's that allow you to run standard UNIX commands in a shell like what you see below. However, it is extensible with a good number of packages that you can choose to install. NEdit is just one that gets included, and I think that I spied Apache too. The standard installation is a web-based affair, with your downloading only the components that you need; it's worth trawling through the possibilities while you're at it.
Now that I am firmly ensconced in the world of Linux, this may be one possibility that I will park, for a while anyway. After all, I now do have the full power of the UNIX command line...
Using alternative editors for SAS programming
5th June 2007When it comes to writing SAS programs, most use the tools that SAS gives us, be it Enterprise Guide, the Enhanced Editor or the Program Editor. While Enterprise Guide can work with UNIX SAS as the processing engine, it is very much a Windows tool and the Enhanced Editor functionality is provided through Windows-only programming (ActiveX, I seem to recall). However, that means that creature comforts are left behind you if you turn to writing SAS code using UNIX SAS; you have only got the good old-fashioned Program Editor supplied by SAS itself. However, there is a trick that you can use to make life more comfortable: SAS does allow you to submit the contents of your paste buffer (or clipboard) using the command SUBMIT BUFFER=DEFAULT and this can be assigned to a function key for ease of use (I use the same key to clear the log and output screens at the same time). In the Windows, you may need to explicitly copy the code to do this but, in UNIX, merely highlighting a section of code with an editor like NEdit will do the trick and, given that NEdit is reasonably pleasant tool for code cutting (the ability to define its macros with a spot of scripting is a definite plus point), this makes life more comfortable again.