The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Turbo Pascal editor for linux?

Turbo Pascal editor for linux?

I cut my teeth, so to speak, on Turbo Pascal and/or MS QBASIC. My question is simple: is there a text editor for Linux that closely emulates either IDE?

So far I'm aware of vi, emacs, and pico, and none of them are what I'd like to see. vi is alien; emacs is also alien, but an entirely different alien; pico is close, but without the CTRL+****ARROW functionality and SHIFT+****ARROW functionality. Not to mention HOME/END. And cut/copy/paste that doesn't require I cut a line at a time.

..
Monday, November 24, 2003

I don't know of any. You might want to check DOSEMU see if you can successfully run EDIT.COM under Linux :-)

Frederic Faure
Monday, November 24, 2003

I f you're doing UNIX/Linux stuff, I'd seriously recommend you learn vi or EMACS.

You can download Borland's Kylix IDE which uses Object Pascal. It is a bit heavyweight though, so it won't exactly bring back memories of Turbo Pascal.

Richard Ponton
Monday, November 24, 2003

Er... Emacs is bloated, and vi is... vi.

Funny that no one ever seemed to clone EDIT, with enhancements like regex, etc.

Frederic Faure
Monday, November 24, 2003

Yes there is.... I stumbled across it on some website. Now this was a long long time ago ... I would be surprised if you could find it again. It was a curses based thing which looked like an exact mockup of the Turbo Editor...

You would be better off putting the time/effort of searching for the thing into learning Emacs. No seriously just learn it. It will take you at the most a day to start using it... slowly you'll explore it and unleash its awesome power! (Seriously its real powerful!)...

Turbo pascal was the first language I learnt. And now I'm real glad I learnt Emacs. For quick edits on terminals I use VI though... and I think you should learn a little VI too so that when all else fails (eg: when working with ancient hardware)... there will always be an "ed" editor available to do your configuration editing...

HTH

Vivek
Monday, November 24, 2003

If you want a Windows-like editor for Linux or Unix, check out NEdit at http://www.nedit.org/ -- it will make your life much easier if you're used to Windows user interface conventions.

NEdit does not emulate WordStar like the Turbo Pascal IDEs used to do. If you really want to use ^QC to go to the bottom of your file, and ^KD to exit the editor, there is always Emacs wordstar-mode...

Cow Orker
Monday, November 24, 2003

Maybe xwpe is something for you (look at http://www.identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/ ).

Roel Schroeven
Monday, November 24, 2003

Thanks Roel for the link--I'm checking that out right now.

As for the emacs suggestions...I'll learn it. Eventually.

..
Monday, November 24, 2003

Try RHIDE http://www.rhide.com

.
Monday, November 24, 2003

There's a port of Turbo Vision to various platforms here:

http://tvision.sourceforge.net/

I seem to remember the built-in text editing widget in that was pretty similar to that in Turbos Pascal and C++. But maybe I remember wrongly; it possibly didn't have all the extra Wordstar features.

(I second the recommendation for NEDIT if you can't find anything else exactly to your taste.)

Insert half smiley here.
Monday, November 24, 2003

hmmm...

I was strongly encourged to use vi at my workplace, and I've since been able to get past the learning curve of vi. I can both emulate and surpass the functionality of any IDE I've used. It was tough, and I had to delve deep into the macro system that gvim uses, but I feel empowered and not encumbered by vi.

EXCEPT... One thing I haven't been able to emulate is the ctips and auto-complete functionality of the Visual Studio class of IDEs. I can't autocomplete the members of a structure or see what types of variables a function requires. I consider this the strongest argument against using vi, and I have yet to run across anything in vi that does this. Most of the "power-tools" of a vi IDE seem to be strongly textually aware, but are stupid when it comes to doing anything that invloves parsing the compilation tree and truly knowing what is being written.

Any gvim power users out there who have been able to solve this problem (besides using emacs :) )?

Shawn Leslie
Monday, November 24, 2003

The editor you are seeking is RHIDE. It emulates the look and feel of the Turbo-C/Pascal editors.

HeWhoMustBeConfused
Monday, November 24, 2003

Run emacs and type Esc X wordstar-mode Enter

Joel Spolsky
Monday, November 24, 2003

Shawn et al -

on a bit of a tangent...in case anyone out there delving into vi (and it's relatives) doesn't already know about it, vim.sourceforge.net contains quite a few enhancements. most are user-contributed scripts and tips.

I too, like the intellisense features from MS VS. Apparently, some other dedicated gvim users do as well because there's at least one vim script there that's being worked on to try to emulate this sort of behavior. I haven't tried it so I can't vouch for whether it's any good or not yet, but give it time...

Not taking a position here--religious editor wars are useless, after all. I've been using gvim across linux and W2K platforms very comfortably for quite some time. Objectively, I'd say that like any powerful tool, the learning curve for vi can be kind of steep. I have no idea about emacs; never used it. So far, my primary gripe about gvim on w2k environments is that many really useful vim scripts from sourceforge use ctags and I just haven't bothered to fiddle with ctags enough on w2k to get it working so the vim scripts run right. So to be fair, that problem is at least partly my own fault.

I've used vanilla vi, and givm non-gui as well as gvim gui. If you're of a mind to go vi and still want to get that borland-tp feel, I'd recommend exploring givm's pages on sourceforge. You might even find somebody else has wanted borland tp-like key mappings for vim themselves.

I understand the nostalgia for it -- tp was the first ide I used as well, and I got quite used to it too.

Say, just thought of it -- aren't slickedit's key mappings set up like tp?

anonQAguy
Monday, November 24, 2003

anonQAguy,

Just install cygwin and use the ctags in there. Painless.

ctags != intellisense.

I too hope that someday VIM will get true intellisense. That'll happen the day there's an accepted API for an IDE to pass intellisense hints to any random text editor.

Richard Ponton
Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Get a real editor, like Visual Studio .NET.

That is the future, not Emaxxx, which was written by an old, schizo communist!

.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003

I use joe and sometimes emacs in wordstar-mode in Linux. But that's because when I think Turbo Pascal I mean version 3-something. No shift-insert-stuff here! Just raw ^K^B power! :)

Jonas B.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003

If you have to use visual studio .NET, you should also try Visual Assist. After using .NET with visual assist for a while every other editor feels stupid.

If you really can't bear VS.NET (it's still pretty horrible even with the lovely visual assist) I hear "Semantic Bovinator" does something similar for Emacs, and last I used Eclipse it did a pretty good job with Java.

Insert half smiley here.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003