Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 07:25:22PM +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-09-02 17:16, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> >OK, excuse the vim fanboyism, but I think any serious D IDE ought to
> >have this kind of functionality to ease navigation through source
> >code.  Scrollbars are so last century. (Not to mention totally
> >worthless when dealing with 10,000-line files when the bar is 1 pixel
> >high and scrolling by 1 pixel maps to 5 pages -- totally worthless
> >for navigation.)
> 
> I would say you have too big files then, but that's another discussion
> :)
[...]

Well, personally I like to structure my code so that such big files
don't happen. :) But then again, there's *cough*std.algorithm*ahem*...

But I have to say that even with overly-large files, vim's concept of
using search to find stuff instead of scrolling and trying to find
things visually, helps one get into a mindset that makes navigating
large source files more manageable. I used to be a big fan of visual
navigation -- pgUp, pgDn, paragraph up, paragraph down, etc., but beyond
500 lines or so, they quickly become impractical. Having a 1-key search
function (that doesn't involve popups and other such annoyances) with
reversible direction is a far superior approach. It also saves a LOT of
keystrokes spent navigating horizontally when trying to reach a specific
point on a line: no need to hit left/right keys 40 times or move your
hand to the mouse and back, just search for a pair of characters (3-4
keystrokes) and you're exactly where you need to be. It took me a while
to get used to this mode of navigation, but I found it far superior to
whatever it was I used to do.


T

-- 
Elegant or ugly code as well as fine or rude sentences have something in common: they don't depend on the language. -- Luca De Vitis