Inheritance of purity

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, February 23, 2012 16:38:13 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> When you have a *real* text editor at your disposal, writing code is
> actually on par, if not better, than development in an IDE. I'd like to
> think that it's only because I'm a weirdo who lived past my generation
> and still haven't moved on from the 70's, but the fact of the matter is
> that there are 300 of us here in this building right now who write code
> with VI every single day, 5 days a week. And I find it hard to believe
> that we're the only ones on earth doing this. :-)

I don't even know the last time that I used an IDE. I always use either vim or 
gvim (preferably gvim, but that's not always possible). No IDE I've ever seen 
can compare. They have some nice features that I'd love to have, but their 
text editing capabilities are so poor that they're generally not worth it. I'm 
a bit more divided when dealing with Java, because then IDEs are able to give 
you quite a lot (way more than you get with C++) such that it's more of a 
less. But I definitely use (g)vim for everything else, and it's been a while
since I was using Java on a regular basis.

One of these days, I'll have try the eclipse plugin which literally plugins 
vim into eclipse and see if that'll do the trick. No plugin that I've tried 
thus far has. SlickEdit has a pretty good vim mode, but it wasn't worth the 
price given the issues with its poor use of gdb (e.g. not being to put break 
points in shared libraries unless they've already been loaded). But maybe 
there's an IDE out there with good enough vim emulation that it would be worth 
using. Until then, I won't part with (g)vim.

- Jonathan M Davis