[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 11:00:49PM +0200, monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 20:58:06 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 08:38:49PM +0000, Justin Whear wrote:
> >>On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:02:02 +0000, Justin Whear wrote:
> >>
> >>> vim and gvim on linux.
> >>
> >>Unix is my IDE.
> >
> >+1, I like that!! :)
> >
> >I'm gonna hafta start saying that from now on, whenever people ask
> >me
> >about IDEs.
> >
> >
> >T
> 
> notepad++ on windows.
> 
> kate on linux. Though I do *try* to learn vim (as in, be efficient
> with it, not quite there yet).

vim (and all vi-derived editors) is... shall we say, a unique beast all
its own. It requires a different *mode* of thinking (har har) than your
usual GUI-based editors.  In most other editors, you think in terms of
"move cursor here, type some characters, move cursor there, hit delete a
few times", etc..  But in vi(m), you operate on a different level of
abstraction. Rather than thinking in terms of individual cursor
movements and single-character operations, you're thinking in terms of
abstract editing operations: "go to the word that begins with 'vo',
replace the word with 'int', go back to the start of the paragraph, open
a new line of text above it", etc..

For many years, I hated vi, vim, and all of its ilk. I found them all
very foreign and counterintuitive, and therefore unproductive. It wasn't
until my supervisor at my first job persuaded me to try it, that I
finally, reluctantly, sat down to learn it for real. At first, I hated
its modality -- being used to the *other* kind of editors all my life
till then, I found myself fighting with vi's modality all the time --
because I was still thinking in the other mindset, you see. But most of
the machines I had to work with at the time didn't have a
sufficiently-sane editor on it (for a while I was copying pico onto
every machine I lay my hands on, but that grew tiresome), except vi,
which was installed by default on Solaris. So I was forced to use vi a
lot.

And then it started to grow on me. I found myself thinking more and more
in terms of abstract operations like I described above, rather than
individual cursor movements and keypresses. And I started acquiring that
twitch in my left little finger that wants to hit ESC every now and
then, for no good reason. :-P

Nowadays, I find myself handicapped when using any non-vi editor. What,
you mean I have to take my hands off their usual place on the keyboard
just to move the cursor?! Why does every keypress modify the text?! Why
doesn't hitting ESC put me in navigation mode?! Why doesn't ':wq' work?!
Why can't I move down by 12 paragraphs instead of hitting the down key
120 times?! (Which, incidentally, takes only 3 keystrokes in vim:
'12}'.)

*shrug*


T

-- 
Acid falls with the rain; with love comes the pain.