[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 06:06:50PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, September 13, 2013 14:58:48 H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> > I use vim (bare text mode, no GUI, so no gvim for me)
> 
> I don't actually use any of the GUI controls. It's just useful to have
> vim in a window that I can resize (you also get better color choices
> than in the shell).

I don't use color (the first thing I do on first installing Linux on a
new machine is to edit .bashrc and turn of color in bash prompts and
ls), so it's one less reason for me to need gvim. :)

I also use ratpoison, which maximizes everything anyway, so I never need
any resizing either (plus ratpoison makes the mouse almost redundant).
So I guess I really don't need anything more than plain vanilla vim. :)


> > for literally *everything*. Everything from system config files to
> > coding to LaTeX for word-processing to scripted graphics processing
> > (thanks to imagemagick) to povray scene files, there's almost
> > nothing in my world that can't be accomplished by vim. :)
> > 
> > Sometimes I wonder how the GUI-encumbered people get any work done
> > at all, what with needing to constantly switch their hands between
> > the keyboard and the rodent, wait for a 600MB application to load up
> > 200MB of eye-candy and paint the screen with 50 toolbar controls, 45
> > of which that they never actually use, click through endless layers
> > of nested menus just to perform a single operation, etc.. ;-)
> > 
> > (OK, OK, so I'm a fossilized relic from the last ice age of '75,
> > I'll stop the GUI-bashing now. :-P You may carry on.)
> 
> LOL. Yeah, the main reason that I don't use IDEs is the fact that
> they're essentially a glorified version of notepad as far as editing
> goes. They _do_ usually have better editing capabilities then the
> ever-so-pathetic notepad, but they can't do much of anything in
> comparison to the likes of vim or emacs. 

I don't even consider a notepad a real "editor". Useful for doodling
random notes to yourself, I suppose, in accordance with its name, but
pretty much unusable for anything beyond that.


> So, I end up using (g)vim for everything. The features that an IDE has
> that vim doesn't typically just aren't worth it. e.g. if I'm stuck
> doing Windows programming, about the most that I even do with VS is
> use the debugger. I even build from the command line rather than open
> the IDE.

We really should improve D support in gdb (or whatever other debugger
people like to use on Windows). I've mainly resorted to writeln
debugging, and it's really quite embarrassing. Though, I think there's
an unfair stigma against it -- I found that well-placed fprintf's (in
C/C++) are surprisingly effective at tracking down hard-to-find bugs in
code involving fork() and dynamically-loaded .so's, that gdb (or any
other debugger) would require lots of tedious setup to even begin to
debug properly. In an embedded environment, where it's not so easy to
substitute system libraries or install the latest debugging scaffolding,
printf debugging may well be on par with "real" debugging with a
debugger, methinks.


> Vim's learning curve is quite nasty, but I definitely think that it
> was worth it.
[...]

Yeah, I hated vi and all its ilk for the longest time. I used to rant
about the counterintuitivity of modal editors all the time on online
discussion boards, until one day I steeled myself to actually learn it,
and now I wouldn't use anything else. I like the way Justin Whear
describes it: it's not so much a set of keyboard shortcuts for common
editing operations, as a *language* for describing editing operations.
A language requires much more effort to learn than a set of shortcuts,
but in the end, it's far more expressive and powerful.


T

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