Month: January 2008

Time for a round-up of the Free and/or Open Source tools I've been using on my work laptop.

1. Eclipse 3.3 (IDE, Java and generic)

I've been dipping into various versions of Eclipse for Java
development for years. Its plugin architecture is brilliant (see
below). Out of the box it handles Java development as sweetly as any
"Professional" edition out there. It also has a built-in editor for Ant
build files (an XML dialect) which I'm finding particularly handy right
now. One feature I really appreciate is the ability to create a
"generic" project that basically just lists all the files in a
directory, regardless of what type of file they are. Very handy for my
current work which involves a series of versioned directories
containing  various flavors of text files. Which brings me to:

2. Afae Plugin for Eclipse

"Afae" stands for "Another Freebooter's All-purpose Editor". It
doesn't appear to be under active development and has stalled at
version 0.9, but don't let that stop you from using it. It adds a TextMate-flavored
text editor to Eclipse that allows me to edit .sh, .bat, .sql, and
other types of files in syntax-colored goodness. It has a bunch of
other features that I'm not using (such as a "post to blog" button on
the toolbar?) but I've found the text editing to be solid.

3. DiffMerge

I've mentioned this before.
Since then it is up to version 3.1 but it is still free, and although
other file comparison tools probably have more features, I've grown to
like this one.

4. AstroGrep

I have long ago given up on making Windows Search
find anything on my file system. How I long for the File Manager applet
in FoxPro for DOS 2.0. That thing was fast. AstroGrep is a GREP utility
for Windows, with a simple UI on top. It's fast, and I can search the
contents of text file with regular expressions. On my latest project I have found it invaluable.