Cygwin and X-Windows

While you can get by using PuTTY (available from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html), I recommend that you go the whole hog and download Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com), because it effectively turns your Windows PC into a Unix server. It gives you X-Windows when you connect to servers, which means, among other things, that you can get font highlighting in Emacs in colour.

I also recommend you learn to use Emacs. The learning curve is somewhat steep, but you will find it well worth the effort. Emacs is available with Cygwin, and is installed on virtually all Unix machines, so even when you use PuTTY to connect to a server, you can always say

  emacs -nw myfile.sas

at the command line to start up Emacs. The ``-nw'' (no window) tells Emacs that you are not running X-windows.

One disadvantage of using SAS on Windows is that you are compelled to use SAS's editor, which does not have one-tenth of the features you will come to expect from editors after using Emacs³