[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:32:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Sure... wait, what?

Download a random binary off the internet. Odds are, if it is an 
exe, it will work. Even if you're on linux, you can run it with 
wine.

If it is a linux binary, good luck. Even a relatively simple 
program like dmd can't be relied upon: on the CentOS box at one 
of my jobs, I had to build from source due to a libc 
incompatibility.

And if it is a gui program, whew, all bets are off! I even have 
programs on my desktop that worked last year, and segfault now. 
Apparently an unrelated update had an ABI incompatibility in gtk. 
Gimp still works (and works quite well), but qemu's new gtk gui 
segfaults, a video game emulator I have runs but the menu all of 
a sudden overlaps the game video, and abiword refuses to start.

These aren't even off the internet, these are things I compiled 
myself less than two years ago!


Contrast to Windows, where programs I wrote while using win98 
still tend to work.



Then, get into features. Contrast the Windows support with the 
linux support in my terminal.d
https://github.com/adamdruppe/misc-stuff-including-D-programming-language-web-stuff/blob/master/terminal.d


The first several *hundred* lines are dealing with random 
incompatibilities in unix terminals, from keys sending different 
sequences (and, of course, the infamous nonsense in 
differentiating the user pressing the esc key from something like 
F1 or another input escape sequence) to dealing with random 
output rules. The KeyRelease event is never fired there, and the 
KeyPress for various keys doesn't actually work either, despite 
the actual PC hardware sending those codes.

And there's features not present either: determining the current 
color so you can get better contrast. Gotta depend on the user 
setting an environment variable. (You can't even use palette 
entry #3 and expect dark or light yellow depending on the bg 
which adjusts the whole system palette. Nope, it will happily put 
light yellow on a white background and you can't tell if it is 
doing that.) Oh, and the fad of semi-transparent terminal 
windows. Please, give me a break. But that's user silliness, not 
the OS, so I'll forgive it.

Anyway, you also can't resize the cursor well, say to indicate 
insert vs overstrike mode. The PC hardware supports it.... but 
Linux assumes you're on a random glass terminal, and accessing 
the actual capabilities of PC hardware is clunky at best.

(You could spin this as a benefit, "look, cross-hardware 
compatibility!" And that's great, it really is, but it could be 
done so much better with graceful degradation techniques, not 
saying "sorry PC users, you can't do that".)


And drawing, oh my. Long story short, coming from DOS or Windows 
to the glorious land of various buggy, incompatible vt100 
emulators is such a shock.


Wanna talk about audio or GUIs, whether high performance or just 
asking for a consistent user experience to grab some basic data? 
Prepare to descend directly into hell, do not pass go, do not 
collect $200.



PS I've used exclusively Linux on my desktop for about a decade 
now. I like a *lot* about it, especially now that I have so many 
hacked up programs (custom taskbar, slightly modified Blackbox 
window manager, a hotkey listener, my own libraries, etc. etc. 
etc.).

But at the same time, using it for all this time after having so 
much fun in the DOS+Windows world has made me see a lot of 
faults. And many of them have gotten worse - what the hell is 
PulseAudio anyway?