What kind of Editor, IDE you are using and which one do you like for D language?

Steven Schveighoffer schveiguy at gmail.com
Mon Dec 30 18:05:28 UTC 2019


On 12/30/19 1:43 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 01:26:11AM +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> [...]
>> I have trouble seeing how an IDE is going to make anyone a better
>> programmer.
> [...]
> 
> Yeah, I call BS on that statement.
> 
> OTOH, it's certainly a valid point that IDE support needs to be good in
> order to appeal to that subset of programmers who prefer to work in an
> IDE.

I don't use an IDE for D programming, just vim + cmdline.

However, I DO use one for php (Netbeans) and Swift (xcode).

In both cases, I'm not as familiar with the standard library. In the 
case of PHP, my IDE tells me types, so it can auto-complete member names 
(I need this for that project). And especially in the case of Swift, the 
long verbose names of everything are hard to guess and hard to remember. 
Not to mention the visual editing of the UI for iOS apps.

If I wrote more code in those languages, I might get to the point where 
I could remember all the proper names. But I still probably would use 
the code completion for it to avoid spelling errors -- something like 
iota is not readily descriptive of what it does, but it's a lot easier 
to spell correctly than didFinishSettingUpViewController or whatever the 
hell the real name is.

IMO, the two killer IDE features are code completion and syntax 
highlighting. Almost every editor (not IDE) already does syntax 
highlighting and many support code completion. Most of the other stuff 
is not critical for success. I can read the compiler outputs and figure 
out the locations of stuff. Yeah, it's nice to have the editor show me 
there is an error. But I can deal with it otherwise.

-Steve


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