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I have an interest in learning C and want to use the Linux platform to do that. While I'm not planning on doing anything large I just want to have an editor that understands the language keywords and provides highlighting at a minimum. Any sort of formatting enhancements would be a plus. What sort of text editors are out there that may fulfill this need?

asked 02 Jul '10, 16:49

Chris%20Stewart's gravatar image

Chris Stewart
5737
accept rate: 50%




I use gvim. gvim is able to understand the keywords and highlights, mark's special, etc. For simple programming in C, this will do the trick. It is, however, using "vim" so you need to know that editor.

You can also use gedit which does the same thing, however, is more of a free form editor.

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answered 02 Jul '10, 18:20

Andy's gravatar image

Andy
2972920
accept rate: 14%

You might find an IDE like Eclipse CDT useful. You can download it here. Hope this helps.

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answered 02 Jul '10, 21:00

TracerBullet's gravatar image

TracerBullet
17817
accept rate: 44%

Yes Eclipse is good. I also like NetBeans, which you can get HERE.

Bluefish is also a very fast and lightweight IDE which works great as just an editor, and you can get that HERE.

Some of the kewl features of Bluefish are the builtin FTP and SCP capabilities, and out of the box it can highlight for several languages including markups like HTML, and also full blown things like PHP, Perl, sh, etc.

I hope that helps :)

Kindest regards,

Bradley .

NorthTech.US

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answered 03 Jul '10, 00:26

tallship's gravatar image

tallship
390111
accept rate: 20%

edited 03 Jul '10, 00:32

I find that Geany does an awful lot for such a small app.

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answered 08 Jul '10, 16:34

Hendronicus's gravatar image

Hendronicus
112
accept rate: 0%

I use emacs.

It has a mode for pretty much any language source file you may want to edit.

A big advantage is that it performs well in most contexts.

For example you can use it on a GUI system, on a command line only system or through a terminal session to a server.

It is very versatile. It does have a learning curve, but you can get started quickly doing basic editing of .c and .h files.

If you fetch a .c file, it will automatically put itself in 'C' mode and do syntax coloring and default to a decent (gnu standard) indentation for <tab> stops.

All of the above may well be true of vim too, I haven't used vim lately so I'm guessing. Both editors are available in any environment you may find yourself.

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answered 13 Apr '11, 10:46

pbz's gravatar image

pbz
111
accept rate: 0%

I know that this is a different forum, but I would like to point you back to the trustworthy site of LinuxQuestions.org to get you what you are looking for. The Sticky post on IDE's in the programming There is a fantastic living list of IDE's for use.

In my opinion Eclipse has a lot of great features for test-first design that could help you build good practices. I don't know that you can find a tutorial that will support that, but . . . you can try. I used Geany last year to study java and i was pleasantly surprised at the functionality. The lack of complex features made me focus on my studies rather than my IDE. I use emacs for my everyday work - for applications and writing python,bash,c and documentation, but I wouldn't recommend the investment in learning emacs for just one lang. I would instead recommend that you use a simple editor that doesn't get you invested in the IDE first. Afterwards you can try out several.

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answered 13 Apr '11, 15:17

davdunc's gravatar image

davdunc
552
accept rate: 50%

I could suggest Kate for smaller projects or KDeveloper for larger.

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answered 16 Apr '11, 14:12

flywheel's gravatar image

flywheel
356
accept rate: 0%

Most text editors can do that so it's more a matter of taste and the situation. I tend to use what I already got if I don't need any advance features.

When I'm on Gnome I use Gedit witch is the default text editor in Gnome. When I'm in the terminal I use nano. Both works great and have syntax highlighting. If one needs more one can look into using more advanced text editors like Emacs or an IDE. When I do C for fun or learning and testing I just have 2 terminals one with the code in nano and one for compiling with gcc and test running it.

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answered 16 Sep '11, 11:12

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aron
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Asked: 02 Jul '10, 16:49

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Last updated: 16 Sep '11, 11:12

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