> BTW, are there any good editors other than vi and emacs? I used vi years ago for FORTRAN, didn't like it, and have never used emacs. Currently I am using Wordpad. :p
Not sure how anyone could would want something besides vi/vim or emacs, but I use emacs with vim key bindings so maybe I'm biased. ;)
vi and emacs are great editors, but each has a mammoth learning curve. I think this is why they often make bad first impressions. I'd be interested to know more about your experience with vi and what you disliked about it.
Other editors I see people using include Notepad++, Textmate, jEdit, nano, NetBeans and DrRacket (which you might like for Arc and Racket code). Unfortunately, I don't know much about these firsthand.
I guess I expected this answer. :) Although I hadn't heard of nano. I should probably bite the bullet and start to familiarize myself with emacs or vi since they are so universal. Probably emacs.
My experience with vi involved some physics modeling years ago in undergrad. I recall 'zz'? I never stop forgetting to toggle the input mode. I don't know why. Maybe I am a bit right-brained, but I have a sloppy way of working. Something about vi felt so 'tight', and I prefer a canvas feel. Not really the best mindset for programming, no doubt, but I have learned it's ok to be a bit sloppy and get things done rather than be very neat and unproductive.
For what it's worth, you're not the only one. I haven't gotten the hang of anything but the Windows text box conventions. :)
Pretty much all I want is an editor that loads quickly, shows whitespace, highlights matching parens, and does regex search-and-replace and find-in-files. Usually my choice has been EditPlus, but Notepad++ is a great open-source alternative, and gedit's another good one (although I think I've had to use grep separately with gedit).
I turn to jEdit for editing Unicode documents, NetBeans for editing C/C++, and DrRacket for editing big Racket projects, but those are extremely rare situations for me. Most of the time I avoid all three of them because of how long they take to load; I can almost always get in and out faster with plain Notepad.
> Something about vi felt so 'tight', and I prefer a canvas feel. Not really the best mindset for programming, no doubt, but I have learned it's ok to be a bit sloppy and get things done rather than be very neat and unproductive.
