Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Gary Willoughby]

On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 17:57:50 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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

This is exactly my experience now i use gVim. I haven't used a 
scrollbar in years while coding (i even have the menu disabled). 
Coupled with the Ctrl-P plugin and you can browse and search 
among massive files in literally a few keystrokes. Before that i 
used Visual Studio on Windows and even with all it's fancy 
folding, regions, class outlines and diagrams i still feel much 
more faster at traversing and understanding code now in Vim.

I just miss the debugger!!! Seriously agree with other comments 
regarding this, D needs a better debugger. Even just a standalone 
one. GDB seriously does not cut it. I use it with DDD (which 
works just) but is horrible. Usually i make do with writeln(). :(