John McKown is on the money (as usual) when he says; > Agreed, in general. That's likely the difference between a "text editor > with enhancements" such as ISPF edit, versus an IDE for a specific > language. I would never use ISPF to create a Java program. I use > Netbeans. I'm easily 5x as productive using Netbeans as ISPF. But I > wouldn't use Netbeans to edit a text file.
ISPF is an absolutely wonderful editor for dealing with line oriented structured text that is no longer than the width of the viewing window. I strongly prefer an ISPF-like editor (in my case SPF/SE on windows) for editing assembler (or Rexx or clist) source code, jcl, parmlib members and pretty much anything I touch that naturally lives inside an 80 byte line. It's great for that kind of thing and if those things are what you deal with all day, then why change? But... while you can scroll left and right and play games with inserts and shifts and nulls and so forth, only a masochist would claim it works well for unstructured data and long lines. There are far better tools for editing plain old text and for languages like C/C++, Java etc. The SDK's for those, particularly things like Eclipse, would make an old assembler coder weep. CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
