Trusty Tools – Text Editors
The first thing you learn when you become a contractor is that without the proper tools you will have a hard time doing anything. As such I am going to opening a new chapter of my blog titled “trusty tools”. In this I will introduce you to some of the tools I use most commonly and those I have found most useful. — Chris
The most useful of these tools, and one you should always have on hand is a text editor. A good text editor is key to writing quickly and efficently.
The two text editors I will be presenting are Nano and Sublime Text 2.
Nano
Nano is a GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) command line text editor first created in 1999 and was named TIP (This Isn’t Pico). Based of of Pico (The text editor in the Pine E-Mail client) but adding functionality such as color coded text, being able to use a mouse and regular expression search / replace features.
Nano is extremely simple to learn compared to VI, VIM and Emacs as all of the key combinations are similar to basic Ctrl+key sequences. Here is a list of the most commonly used functions and their key combos.
Cut — Ctrl+k
Uncut — Ctrl+u
Save — Ctrl+o
Search — Ctrl+w
Exit — Ctrl+x
help — Ctrl+g
One of the other useful things is that these commands are always available at the bottom of your window in case you need to refrence them.
This is a normal Text file in nano
This is a python file in nano
Sublime Text 2
There is nothing like a really good GUI text editor. and by far Sublime Text is the best I have encountered.
Initially released in 2008 by Jon skinner while sublime text is a closed source, proprietary software, It has an amazing feature set, a clean interface, and a Python API for extensibility.
 |
| Regular Text File |
 |
| Python Code in distraction free mode |
 |
||||||||
| HTML File opened in folder view |
 |
|||||
| Python code normally |
No Comments