D IDE

[Neia Neutuladh]

On 09/26/2018 08:23 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> On 09/05/2018 01:34 PM, ShadoLight wrote:
>>
>> 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!
> 
> I sometimes wonder similar things about Vim/Emacs users, too ;)

A lot of people use Vim/Emacs plus a full IDE.

I use IntelliJ for work. I also use Vim. Vim is much better when I know 
my APIs, and it's exceptional at applying transformations to a block of 
text. IntelliJ is much better when I'm using an API I'm unfamiliar with. 
Sometimes I'll switch back and forth editing the same file -- I'll hack 
something together in Vim and then use IntelliJ to quickly find and fix 
errors.

For D, unfortunately, I haven't gotten an IDE to work yet. Not with any 
appreciable degree of autocomplete. So I stick with Vim pretty much 
entirely.

> But don't forget, not all non-IDE people are Vim/Emacs. And just like 
> IDE development, plain-editor development didn't stagnate either. Many 
> non-IDE users (like me) use editors that are far more contemporary than 
> Vim/Emacs and *don't* have that learning curve.

Pretty much all advanced features in a text editor have a learning 
curve. Kind of unavoidable; we're asking text editors to do complex 
things. GUI editors can offer *less* of a learning curve, and they can 
offer advice better, but they can't eliminate it entirely.

> And for that matter, sometimes I get the impression that IDE users think 
> non-IDE editors are far less capable than they really are. For the most 
> part, "IDE" mostly just means: editor + GUI-based buildsystem + debugger.

Autocomplete, highlighting errors, semantic code navigation, and 
displaying extra semantic information are other IDE features that text 
editors tend to lack.

On the other hand, I've seen projects billing themselves as IDEs when 
they were pretty much just a tree view for files in the project, a 
GtkSourceView, and a build button.