Mainstream D Programming

[David Brown]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 04:00:01PM -0400, Robert Fraser wrote:
>David Brown Wrote:
>
>> The problem is that when one uses a specific-focus refactoring tool, they
>> are limited to the transformations that the authors of the tools have
>> thought of (which is still a very useful set), but without the
>> general-purpose text transformations available in a good programmer's
>> editor, one can easily miss other types of refactoring that are also quite
>> useful.
>
>Most IDEs have regular expressions, etc. -- the features available in a
>good "programmer's editor" are a subset of the features available in a
>good IDE.

Boy, this is starting to get very off topic :-)

Regexps are a rather minor (but important) feature of an editor.  I suspect
a lot of it is just the fact that I've been programming in 'vi' for more
than 20 years.  Something like 'vim' with it's incremental IDE-like
features is a much better improvement for me than an IDE with a completely
different underlying editor model.

If there was _an_ IDE that I could learn, it might be worth the effort, and
eclipse might be on the way to becoming that.  But, we're talking a
learning curve on a similar order to learning to type on a Dvorak keyboard.

Also, I tend to deal with lots of code in lots of different projects,
rather than a single project.  I find it better to have powerful, but more
general functionality, than a tool that often doesn't even know the
languages that I'm working with.

I also work a lot in situations where I don't have a gui available.  Vim
gives me all of its functionality over an ssh connection.

Dave