Generally speaking, an editor refers to any program capable of editing files. On the SCC, we mainly use the word editor to refer to software that can be used to manipulate text files, such as pieces of program code or shell scripts. For other media types, there are specialized editors as well.
Text Editors
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| geany | Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer’s text editor. It runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS and is translated into over 40 languages. It has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages. |
| gedit | gedit is a simple and clean text editor for the GNOME Desktop. It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages. Recommended for new users. |
| emacs | Emacs is an advanced text editor. It is extremely extensible and configurable. |
| vi, vim, gvim | vim (based on ‘vi’) is the most popular text editor on Linux and is very sophisticated. It is the de facto standard Linux editor. It is screen oriented (no GUI), and operates in two modes – ‘insert’ and ‘command’ mode. gvim is a version of vim with a GUI. On the SCC, all three commands are available as basic system utilities. |
| nano | nano is a simple and user friendly GNU text editor, not as fully featured as vim or emacs, but easier to learn for beginners to Linux. |
Image Editors (including Document Viewers)
Besides text editors, there are also tools that can handle more complex document types such as GIF, JPEG, PDF, HTML, CSV, and many others. Most of these tools require X-Forwarding.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| firefox | The firefox web browser is installed on the SCC as a basic system utility. |
| evince | Lightweight GNOME Document Viewer. It supports PDF, PostScript, DJVU, DVI, TIFF, XPS, and SyncTex, as well as a variety of comic book formats, such as CBR, CBZ, CB7, and CBT. |
| pdftk | pdftk is a handy command-line tool for manipulating PDF documents. Type ‘pdftk –help’ for details. |
| soffice | libreoffice is an open source office suite providing much of the functionality of Microsoft Office. Load the office suit from the command line without module:
|
| imagemagick | These are a set of command-line tools for digital image manipulation. They support over 200 image formats and are available as an SCC module. Load appropriate module to access:
|
| gimp | GNU Image Manipulation Program; available on Windows and Macs as well as Linux. This program is similar to Photoshop but open source. Simply typing ‘gimp’ will launch the GUI. |
| tiff | tiff provides a number of tools and C libraries to work with TIFF image files. Load appropriate module to access:
|
Audio/Video Editors
Audio Editors are tools that can handle sound and music and perform editing functions upon these media files. Similarly, video editors are tools for creating, modifying and managing video media files. Due to the characteristics of the SCC hardware configuration, we currently do not support any audio or video editors that may be on other Linux systems.
IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)
An Integrated Development Environment, often abbreviated to IDE, is usually a large comprehensive application for building software. It often integrates the following basic function modules:
- source code editor
- local automated building tools
- debugger
- often times, it also provides version control support
IDEs available on the SCC:
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| atom | Atom is from github; and called ‘a hackable text editor for the 21st century’. It provides rich and highly configurable functionalities. It’s integrated extremely well with github and is designed to support web development. Use module avail atom to see available versions, and module load atom/version to load a specific version. |
| vscode | Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful source code development IDE provided by Microsoft. It has built in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js, and is also extensible to other languages and runtimes, such as C++, C#, python, .NET, etc. It has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. Use module avail vscode to see available versions, and module load vscode/version to load a specific version.
See our page on remotely connecting your local VSCode to the SCC. |
| eclipse | Eclipse is an open source IDE originally primarily designed for Java application development. It has since been extended to almost all software programming languages via plug-ins. Use module avail eclipse to see available versions, and module load eclipse/version to load a specific version. |
Other Specialized Editors
Besides all the software tools mentioned above, there are many specialized software packages for editing particular scientific objects, such as MRI brain image scans, molecules, physical particles, etc. These specialized software packages are beyond the scope of this page. Users are encouraged to explore RCS’s software list page for more information, particularly checking out the ‘imaging’, ‘utilities’ and ‘libraries’ categories.
NOTE: all software versions mentioned in this page are subject to be updated without notice.