As with any programmer, I have a set of tools I use on a frequent basis. Coming from a Windows background, you need a powerful text editor for basic tasks. It needs the ability to read files coming in from Unix as well as Windows, hopefully has the capability to run external programs, an easy interface for working with large file sets, and maybe syntax highlighting.

If I’m on a *nix machine and coming in over a terminal, I will be using Vim. When I’m on Windows, I used to use EditPlus. Now, I’m finding myself more and more on different operating systems but working with the same set of files. So I decided to see what was available that was cross platform and didn’t run in a terminal window.

jEdit rose to the top. However, I had a few issues to get past. The first and foremost being the non-native look and feel of a Java Swing application. Not a java application, but a Swing application… Important distinction.

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It seems ridiculous that although Windows will burn cds from within Explorer, it doesn’t know how to handle ISO files. What a crock of shit! You mean I am going to have to pay to burn this ISO of Linux I just downloaded?!

Well, luckily, there is a relatively new and free program released that does one thing only and does it well. ISO Recorder integrates seamlessly with Explorer and doesn’t install any extra crap that you don’t care about.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm