[dhodgins]

Many of the places i’ve worked would rather their workforce did half the work they could do, instead of allowing use of free/cheap tools. Tools that do always seem to be there are:

Notepad++ which supports many languages (you can download a q syntax file), has tabs, diff, column/area select, and autocomplete. Files are saved to a temp file even if you never hit save, or have a computer crash so you never lose work.

WinSCP also seems to always be available which allows you to have a gui file browser for your linux server and double clicking files (if you set the preferences) will open the file in Notepad++ and every time you hit save WinSCP copies the files back. You have to be careful if your disk fills up as this can result in files being emptied when you edit them, but then do regular pushes to git and try to get a disk (eg local to a box rather than shared network) that won’t fill up.

I sometimes write my own editor using JS, HTML5, and kdb+ websockets.

I used to be a big fan of Eclipse but a few years ago the whole eclipse project became totally unstable for Java, the kdb plugin was abandonware on an old version of kdb, so I gave up on it.

Be careful of webbased editors. They can be good but most tend to freeze when you run a query, if your query never comes back you lose all your work and can’t even copy and paste from the editor pane anymore.