For some reason, we started using jEdit as our official editor in CS180, since apparently our students weren't hax0r enough to handle Vim or Emacs (we stopped using Eclipse as well, for some reason that I don't really know). Looking back over the past few years, I wonder if jEdit is such a good choice. They tout themselves as a "programmer's text editor," but I think it sucks. We have 25 [apparently theoretically] identical computers in the CS180 lab, but jEdit does wacky stuff like behave really oddly if num lock is on (or off, one or the other), not syntax highlight properly on some computers, etc.
I'm hoping that as the next head/lead/whatever TA, I can persuade the course administrators to change the editor, if I want, but I'm not entirely sure what I would suggest using. The options seem to be:
- Vim
- Emacs
- Pico/Nano
- Eclipse
- IntelliJ IDEA
- NetBeans
Some of these options are laughable (if you ask me, anyway). Using vim or emacs as a main editor is probably still not a great idea; it would be wise to learn in CS180 anyway, but the warring of the two editors means some students would be learning one and some would learn another, as mandated by the instructing TA. This is probably a crappy idea, and students should try both on their own, since the USB has tutorials on both. Pico on lore doesn't have syntax highlighting; I don't really know why we don't use Eclipse (other than I think it can eat poop), IDEA looks interesting (but weaning new programmers on IDEs means they're going to have tons of fun in CS240), and NetBeans? Yeah...
I'm open to opinions, though I wonder if anything will ever come of it. Maybe I'm just posting so I don't feel so lazy.
