Comments on: Vital Free Software For Computing Students

By: Hazel

Hazel — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:55:06 +0000

Thanks again Bryan, that does look pretty cool.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:55:15 +0000

Mind Mapper * 875 == http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/

You should check out Mind Raider its a pretty spectacular piece of software.

By: Hazel

Hazel — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:49:36 +0000

There’s nothing wrong with gedit… I have it on the list. I just prefer Kate.

And thanks!

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:36:20 +0000

What’s wrong with gedit? … Good luck in school!

By: Hazel

Hazel — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:00:15 +0000

Thanks, I don’t use SciTE but I know a lot of people highly recommend it.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:27:35 +0000

I like SciTE, a very customizable programmer’s editor that comes with properties files (syntax highlighting, etc.) for dozens of programming languages. SciTE is available for both Windows and X-windows (Unix/Linux/BSD), nice if you work cross-platform. It’s not a full IDE, because there is no debugger, but you can launch a build script from within the editor.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:21:57 +0000

Good tips, Bryan. Yeah, a DB Explorer would be useful. I tend to only use phpMyAdmin, though. And ya gotta love version control. Subversion (and TortoiseSVN when I’m on Windows) is my fave. I use ActiveState Komodo (not free, but well worth every penny) for my PHP IDE, and it integrates Subversion flawlessly. It also has support for CVS and Git as well, but seeing as how I never use them, I don’t know how support is for them.

Excellent suggestions as always, Hazel.

By: Hazel

Hazel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:14:11 +0000

Thanks Bryan, I haven’t really had to work with databases for my university work (although I have done in my free time) so I never thought of adding that. I’ll look at trying a couple of examples (the only tools I’ve used are Eclipse SQL Explorer and phpMyAdmin) and adding them to the list.

Thanks for your tips on version control too.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:21:00 +0000

Very nice list. One thing I would think about adding in is a Database Explorer. These can be invaluable when working with Databases, something I’m sure a computing student will find themselves doing rather frequently. One such open source program is SQL Explorer. Also a note about version control, if you commit often when your project is functioning correctly, you can easily track down where you introduced an error by diffing with the most recent revision in the repository. I have found that most VCS clients have robust diffing utilities and can be used very effectively in finding newly introduced bugs.