Shell Scripting Editor

[Alan Garner]

Besides the normal text editors, what scripting editors are available. I know, I know!!! Vi is all I need but humor me, please.

I am just beginning to write shell scripts and would like to use an editor that has syntax checking and highlighting similar to Visual Studio.

Any help would be appreciated!

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Alan:

'vim' offers additional features including color highlighting. You can obtain 'vim' here:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Editors/vim-7.1/

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

If you want Unix based, I don't know of any.

If you want PC based (Windows) then you might try Crimson Editor. The price is right (FREE) and it supports syntax highlighting for a number of languages.

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Go to any porting and archive Centre:
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/

and search on editors.

By far the most powerful of these that will run on a character-based terminal is emacs. It can be configured to do syntax checking on a huge variety of languages --- but emacs is feature-rich and has a somewhat steep learning curve. Emacs even has a built-inn Lisp interpreter so there are essentially no limits to what the editor can be configured to do. The enhanced version of vi (vim) can also be used to highlight syntax errors.I would stay away from these feature-rich editors until you don't need them because you are making it much harder to spot you own mistakes and those of others when you have to debug their code. After you become reasonably proficient at shell programming then choosing a feature-rich editor makes sense. It's not the shell programming syntax that gives the novice trouble. It's the logic. After all there are only a small number of keywords in the shell.
There is another compelling reason to stick with that clunky vi editor; it's the only one that you are absolutely, positively guaranteed to have on any UNIX box.

[dirk dierickx]

'geany' is my favorite IDE. It works with shell scripts, perl, python, c(++), html, (free)pascal...

and it is light wight, ideal for system admins who don't work on big projects (programming wise).

http://geany.uvena.de/

before i knew geany, i used to use jedit, a bit as above (but with lots of plugins) and written in java. pretty good.

http://www.jedit.org/

[Alan Garner]

Thanks for all your advice. I will investigate eah of the above listed options and choose one of my liking!