D IDE

Atila Neves atila.neves at gmail.com
Wed Sep 12 11:41:40 UTC 2018


On Wednesday, 5 September 2018 at 17:34:17 UTC, ShadoLight wrote:
> On Wednesday, 5 September 2018 at 13:11:18 UTC, Jonathan M 
> Davis wrote:
>
> It anyway appears that Vim/Emacs are often extended by plugins, 
> and this will be the only way to have some project manage 
> features.

I'm an Emacs user. I have never needed project management 
features. If I want to edit a new file, I do that.

You might be confusing "project management" with a build system. 
I'm not sure, but then I just use a build system such as CMake.

> I maintain that it is not practical trying to duplicate this in 
> your editor of choice except if the amount of time you will 
> save (from increased productivity) exceed the time taken to do 
> this. I maintain that for bug fixing/support in a big 
> organization this will hardly ever be the case.

True, but why would anyone want to duplicate it? The only reason 
I can think of is if the team is using Visual Studio and the .sln 
file is the agreed-upon build system. I know this happens in real 
life, but it shouldn't. And even then... open VS, add a file, go 
back to editing in Emacs/vim/whathaveyou. Or edit the XML 
directly.

> But even if you avoid this step and can build/run/test from the 
> command-line it may not be optimal in certain debugging 
> scenarios. See next point.

You don't have to build/run/test from the command-line, you can 
do it in-editor.

> Right, but depending on your type of debugging there is some 
> things which just make more sense to do from right inside the 
> debugger. If you hit a data value break-point or such on an 
> attached debugger you can just double-click the line in the 
> stack trace to go to the appropriate line in the IDE editor. No 
> need to switch tasks to Vim/Emacs, do a go-to or whatever to 
> get to the same place. The type of debugging I'm talking about 
> is not your 'single step' variety.

No need to switch tasks to Emacs either, just run the debugger in 
Emacs and you can double-click if you want to. Although, if 
you're an Emacs user you're probably not going to want to use the 
mouse.

> I sometimes wonder if the Vim/Emacs 'affectionados' spend so 
> much time mastering their editors (which by all accounts have a 
> steep learning curve), that they forgot that IDE development 
> did not stagnate after they left!

It's not a question of forgetting what IDEs can do. It's a 
question of either not needing those features or having them in 
the editor. I've used Visual Studio, Eclipse, IDEA, etc. I just 
don't like them.

This is what I need from an IDE: autocompletion, go to 
definition, on-the-fly syntax checking. I have all of that in 
Emacs.

> Again, it depends on what you mean by 'editing'.

I think he means... editing. Cutting, pasting, replacing, that 
kind of thing.

> If you are referring to coding where you are developing from 
> scratch, then sure - I agree.

That's not editing, that's writing. In that case, notepad is 
enough, or cat. There's a reason why vim's normal mode is about 
editing, not writing (inserting).

> But the whole point of my post was to point out that this is 
> not the only use-case for some of us. And in some of these 
> other use-cases IDEs are actually superior to editors.

That's your opinion, you're entitled to it and I'm not going to 
try and change your mind. Mine is that no IDE gets close to the 
power of a good editor. In your favourite IDE, can you set up any 
key combination you want to:

1. Jump to the end of the current line
2. Check to see if there's a semicolon there
3. If not, add one
4. Open a new line beneath

No? I don't learn how to use Emacs, Emacs learns *me*.

And that was just a simple example.

> For another example IDEs are also in some ways a 'standard' 
> inside big organizations in a way that any editor cannot be - 
> the lowest barrier of entry to get new members up to speed in a 
> team. And for some languages (Java/C#) you give up a lot by not 
> developing inside an IDE. In fact, for Java and C#, the 
> appeal/power of the languages is in many ways directly related 
> to the IDE! Now throw in mixing C# with C++ (or even D) 
> development... I'm sure you get my drift!

Most of what I'd need an IDE for in Java (I'd probably use IDEA 
if I were to write Java) I don't need for D.


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