IRIX and Software

I'm getting my son into programming on his Indy Yes - I got my 10 year old son an Indy - I like to start them out young . I put 5.3 on it so I could put the IDO, and I just happen to have Fortran as well, so he has C and Fortran, and of course Perl. I also put Basic and Logo on it because he has been playing with basic on one of my Older Commodores.

So, now he has languages to learn, I think vi is a bit much for him just yet. I pulled Pine out of my PTF ( remember the old Prime Time Freeware collections ?? ) and compiled Pico. Also, as a requirement to get Logo installed, emacs was added too. I'm leaning toward Xemacs or maybe Pico.

But what does everyone else think?

Just for the record, I only use vi. Infact, I get frustrated when I'm in Word or Pages and start typing vi command sequences resulting in nothing more than a string of characters going across the screen.

Thanks.

- Derrik

Pico/Nano (the GNU Pico clone) are pretty easy text-mode editors (Pico is what the Uni started us out on), but he might be more comfortable with an X-based editor. I do kind of like Nedit under X.

You could always install the CDE packages and have him use DTpad- that's pretty stripped down and easy to learn, but Nedit is much more powerful. I never really got "into" the whole Emacs/XEmacs "thing" because they were so resource-hungry.

My vote goes to Nedit.
Has smart indentation for C (may need to switch it on) as well as syntax highlighting for C, Fortran and Perl.
Not sure about Basic but you could add another custom syntax definition file (or possibly download it from Nedit site).

Works great on IRIX.

Has shortcuts but he can start by using the mouse and 'graduate' to shortcuts over time.

Nik.