In addition to the IDEs (Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA) that we’ll be using, there are times when you will need to do some quick-and-dirty text editing, which—for whatever reason—using an IDE may be impractical (or at least, very inconvenient). Sometimes this will be when accessing server resources remotely, in which case you’ll generally be limited to editors such as Vim; but this situation occurs in GUI environments as well. One thing many developers have learned from hard experience is that the basic text editors included in Windows and OS X (Notepad and TextEdit, respectively) are very poorly suited to the task. On the other hand, coercing word processors to act like text editors for these purposes is similarly frustrating.

We require that every bootcamp participant install (or already have) a suitable text editor for these purposes. (Again, Notepad, TextEdit, and Word are definitely not acceptable. GEdit on Linux is minimally acceptable.) We don’t dictate the specific choice, but generally acceptable (and free—at least for basic versions) options include

Please ensure that you have at least one such package installed on the computer that you’ll be using in the bootcamp.