This project aims to provide an easy to use text editor for programming primers in classrooms. You can easily add/modify functionality if you have some skills on the development with Java + NetBeans. Please try this out.

Java 6, or higher (JRE)

Mac version is NOT compatible with Java 9 or higher. We recommend to use JDK 8.

Just double-click icon (Mac and Windows version).

In Linux boxes, enter the following command in Terminal

java -jar TurtleEdit.jar

Many years I've been teaching courses on information & computer science as liberal arts for freshmen. Students nowadays already get used to using computers probably because they are so-called digital natives. However, as for the subjects that require logical and abstract thinking, I cannot recognize large differences from older generations.

Nevertheless their good skills of usage of computers, they sometimes stall at the same typical steps in computer labs, for example, when learning new topics like programming, as the older generations did.

Some of typical false steps, seemingly not related to logical/computational thinking, are

1. inclusion of white space in the file name of source program,
2. working in a directory other than the place where source code is saved,
3. compiling unsaved source file, and
4. unnoticeable multibyte characters in source code.

Furthermore, most of them are not aware of useful functions of text editor such as line-number display to figure out the location of errors.

There are so many good and heavy-armed IDEs, and many of them are available in free of charge. Unfortunately, such full-featured software seems to be too complicated in several aspects for beginners of programming.

Therefore I felt the need for a minimal but friendly IDE for beginners especially, for freshmen, in our university. That is the reason why I wrote TurtleEdit.

In fact, this is a kind of dumb text editor without remarkable features. However, as a start-up tool for beginners, this software provides

• line number display,
• warming message in the case file name contains white space(s),
• single button click to perform compilation and execution of codes,
• prompt to save the content if modified before compiling,
• displaying multibyte characters in colored boxes, and
• an easy way to check the location and content of current working directory.

As an additional function, you can perform filtering of text with regular expressions.

Since the code is written with Java+NetBeans and the size of code is very small, this editor should be quite portable and easy to modify upon your purpose.

This might not be a good coding example, however, it would be my great pleasure if you could find this useful, in particular, for teaching.

Yoshinori Hayakawa (Center for Information Technology in Education, Tohoku University)