Hardy Heron Hey!

Sorry for the long gap between the posts, I kinda lost focus. So here’s a new one.

I made a fresh install of Hardy Heron. I skipped Compiz, Emerald and AWN this time. I finally realized that some of this are still buggy, and are sometimes really annoying.

I decided to have my plain old Gnome and Metacity this time. No extra eye candies.

Now, I focus on productivity. I love my Gedit. I also love it when running with administrator privileges, so I made an appliction launcher sitting on my top panel with this command.

gksudo gedit

The gksudo command makes your gedit run with administrator privileges, it’s the pretty GUI box that darkens everything in the background and asks for your password.

Before gksudo, i ran my launcher with sudo, which keeps a bash terminal running on the background, it kinda eats up some screen real estate, so i decided to find a way to get rid of it.

I’m studying up on Python, it’s a great language. Guess what’s my best IDE for python.

Of course, Gedit!

There’s many tutorials online that teaches how to make your Gedit feel like a real IDE, nothing really comes close to a real IDE, but that’s actually the best part, ’cause we don’t want all of that bloat!

Here’s a tutorial I found to try to achieve a Python IDE:

Using Gedit as a Python IDE (instructables), this is actually good, but you may want to skip the python console on the bottom pane. When your script acts up, your gedit might crash too, you may want to see Better Python Console, it opens a new window and runs your script there. Neat.

I recommend the following plugins, which I myself, use everyday.

Auto Tab, learns your tabbing preferences and uses it when you Tab.

Better Python Console, an external python interpreter window.

External Tools, built in with Gedit.

File Browser Pane, built in with Gedit.

HTML Tidy, you’re a good person when you write good html. Shows you your HTML errors and will help you clean up bad mark up.

Indent Lines, built in with Gedit.

Insert Date/Time, built in with Gedit, good for Documentation.

Modelines, built in with Gedit, this is your usual beloved modelines.

Project Manager, organize your files into one project file.

Python Code Completion, really handy.

Python Outline, browse your code in GUI in the side pane, really good for big projects or large scripts.

Snippets, built in with Gedit.

Spell Checker, built in with Gedit, of course you’d hate a typo error.

Tag List, built in with Gedit, suggests commonly used tags or strings.

Word Completion, suggests words that are used in other files opened in other tabs or windows, really handy.

Oh, I almost forgot, here’s how to install these plugins.

Extract the files to:
/home/[yourname]/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/

if you want to install them for all users extract the files to:
/usr/lib/gedit-2/plugins/

That simple. Some other plugins, none in this post, will require you to install the plugin via a make or something else, don’t worry, those packages usually provide a step by step instruction, just NEVER IGNORE THE README file.

web development text editors for ubuntu

now that i got the server and preprocessor running, i need to have programs to write programs with. the following are the most likely a minimalistic programmer would want, well.. at least this is what i want.

clean interface- not too much toolbars and panels.
syntax highlighting-  show me which is which with just one look.
syntax check- this one is just to spice the program a bit, not necesarry.
macros- of course.
tabbed editing- another of course.

gPHPedit
it’s like gedit, with lesser stuff in it. has a more powerful syntax highlighter, specifically for HTML and PHP. got the cleanest interface i’ve found. got macros of course. and can check your code, not sure if this syntax check works properly, but i really don’t care much. got tabbed editing of course.

sudo apt-get install gphpedit 

Screem
well this is the next best thing, but it still kind of bulky for me. it’s got about 2 toolbars and a splitpanel, you can turn this stuff off if it’s too messy for you, like me. got macros. tabbed editing. it has an average syntax highlighter, very close to gedit, does not highlight two languages at once, like XHTML+PHP. i think it has ftp or live editing, something like that. i don’t remember seeing a syntax checker in there, but maybe it has. if you didn’t like gphpedit, then you’d want to try this.

sudo apt-get install screem 

i’m also trying VIM+Screen right now, it’s kind of hard to learn, but it surely has a fast workflow, so there, that’s also worth a try. i think it’s defaultly installed with ubuntu, otherwise…

sudo apt-get install vim screen