In addition to general-purpose text editors, Linux sports a large number of text editors with special features for programming, such as syntax highlighting. The extended version of vi, called vim, includes a number of add-ons that can help you with C programming tasks. Emacs also includes a wide array of features to help programming. Both of these editors can act as development environments with a bit of configuration. As mentioned previously, both come with most Linux distributions.

I also like an editor called nedit and another one called jedit. The jedit editor is written in Java, so that it runs the same on Windows and Linux, a big win if you must work on multiple platforms. (Emacs and vim have versions that work on Windows, too, along with Linux.) If you use jedit, you must have a Java runtime environment installed.

Cross Reference

Download nedit from www.nedit.org. Download jedit from www.jedit.org. Download Java runtime environments from Sun at http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads.html or IBM at www.ibm.com/java/jdk/ and select the IBM Developer Kit for Linux.