Let's give a honor to dead giants!

[Ary Manzana]

On 4/20/12 11:34 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 05:15:36AM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>> On 20/04/12 04:51, Ary Manzana wrote:
>>> * Eclispe is great for writing IDEs but after programming in Ruby for
>>> some years now and exclusively using vim I can't go back to using a
>>> slow IDE so I don't think I'll ever write anything else for Eclipse.
>>
>> vim actually seems like a great development environment for D -- it
>> was the first I could set up to really meet my preferences (I'm sure
>> Emacs is also great, but I never got my head round it sufficiently).
>> The caveat being that my concept of IDE is "glorified text editor that
>> has really nice handling of syntax highlighting and auto-indentation
>> and in particular supports smart tab indentation with tabs for indent,
>> spaces for alignment".
>
> I use vim, and would not touch an IDE with a 20-foot sterilized pole.
> Vim has decent auto-indentation, and quite configurable in what it does
> with tabs (expandtab, noexpandtab, tabstop, shiftwidth, etc.). I'm sure
> if somebody's willing to invest the time, you can do D autocompletion in
> vim too (but I've never felt the need for it).

I use autocompletion in vim with a plugin that just offers every 
possible text found in all buffers. This has worked great for me in Ruby 
because every name is so intuitive and similar names (count, length, 
size) are provided as aliases so you almost never make a mistake when 
writing code (at least when writing the correct names, of course bugs 
lurk now and then.)

> One thing I miss, though, is ctags support for D. You don't know how
> powerful such a simple concept is; it lets you navigate 50,000-line
> source files without even batting an eyelid.  :-) (Just try that in an
> IDE, and you'll soon get an aneurism from trying to scroll with a
> 1-pixel high scrollbar...)

How do you implement ctags for a language? I know there is one for Ruby. 
What's the difficulty of making one for D?