Last week I mentioned that in the course of switching from Notepad++ to Vim I lost the ability to run Stata do-files or selected lines from within the text editor, and I asked my readers for help if they had a solution. What do you know, one of them did, and wrote to me all [...]

I was looking for an excuse to try something new and I decided to pick on one Notepad++ shortcoming that was handy: the Stata syntax highlighting gets utterly mangled after compound quotes -- `"`like so'"' -- which do sometimes arise, usually in the process of file open/file write.  Vim does not get confused by compound quotes [...]

Notepad is nice, but you can do better. Notepad++ can highlight your syntax, help you match your parentheses and, coolest of all, fold your code. If you already program in some other language using some graphical IDE, you know what that means. If you don't, here: when you enclose slabs of your Stata do-files inside what Stata [...]

If you right-click on a do-file under Windows XP, you can either open it or edit it. Opening it means that Stata will launch and attempt to execute it. The editing, by default, will also trigger a Stata launch, under the assumption that you want to edit the do-file inside Stata's own do-file editor. That [...]