What IDE are you using?

[Lafolie]

The problem here is the perception of better. You could say that to communicate we don't need the internet, but you could argue that the internet is 'better' for communication than without it. Yet look what has come with it - a storm of (largely) unprecedented ethical dilemmas that swells and rages across our lives. There are thousands of problems that this 'better' solution has brought, that - while they may have existed previously - now howl at us, more loudly so each day.

IDEs are usually feature-rich and have specific workflows that they are intended for. Even basic text editors require some form of configuration before you can use them efficiently (highlighting, scripts (bash?), gui layouts etc). Further down the line you might even encounter problems related to the way the IDE works. In fact, a friend of mine I'm working with had some trouble with just this (he was in fact using Visual Studio). This problem delayed his work, and we have precious little time to work on this project. That plain sucks. Unfortunately we have little choice but to use Visual Studio for this project.

Come to think of it, most of the programmers I find most inspiring use vi or one of it's derivatives (or emacs!) - you can't really get much more barebones than that. Sure, it has some fancy features, but the core philosophy is incredibly simple.

So, using something just because it is "better" could be a bridge too far.

This is a reason why not to use something just because "there's better".

[luaz]

The problem here is the perception of better. You could say that to communicate we don't need the internet, but you could argue that the internet is 'better' for communication than without it. Yet look what has come with it - a storm of (largely) unprecedented ethical dilemmas that swells and rages across our lives. There are thousands of problems that this 'better' solution has brought, that - while they may have existed previously - now howl at us, more loudly so each day.

IDEs are usually feature-rich and have specific workflows that they are intended for. Even basic text editors require some form of configuration before you can use them efficiently (highlighting, scripts (bash?), gui layouts etc). Further down the line you might even encounter problems related to the way the IDE works. In fact, a friend of mine I'm working with had some trouble with just this (he was in fact using Visual Studio). This problem delayed his work, and we have precious little time to work on this project. That plain sucks. Unfortunately we have little choice but to use Visual Studio for this project.

Come to think of it, most of the programmers I find most inspiring use vi or one of it's derivatives (or emacs!) - you can't really get much more barebones than that. Sure, it has some fancy features, but the core philosophy is incredibly simple.

So, using something just because it is "better" could be a bridge too far.

This is a reason why not to use something just because "there's better".

My view isn't as shallow as that - I don't do something because someone tells me it is so (an ad? Price?). Auto-completion, IntelliSense, interface, debugger - these are the things things that I find significantly more comforting about it than any other IDE. The rest are either not as developed as it is, or are simply workarounds. I hate workarounds.

[Inny]

Xubuntu 12.04, roxterm, and gvim.

The reason I develop this way is because in my professional line of work, it's a typical task to ssh in to a CentOS server and vim a text file there. In a previous role, I was a Windows/MacOSX programmer using Visual Studio, XCode, QtCreator, and Vim. I think I played with Eclipse for a while, but I hated it.

If you had to ask me which one I prefer, it's Vim and (L)Unix. I really like having the sheer depth of customization, wide variety of plugins and scripts, and so many tools that are a quick command line search away, that come installed with a very strong promise that I won't be casually finding bugs (security or otherwise) that'll impede my work. Also, it's pretty easy to develop a good muscle-memory and intuition towards this stuff. Though, I never quite got the hang of hjkl for movement, mostly because I play a lot of minecraft and wasd controls cognitively interfere with it.

That said, GUIs on Linux suck. I settled on XFCE for the same reason that most have, because KDE is too resource intense, and Gnome3 is a user experience disaster (and Unity wasn't made for people like me). Plus a lot of the gui-driven tools for various things are very lacking. Gimp takes a lot to learn. Video recording and editing tools are all disappointing. Also worth mentioning is that gaming is a lost cause.

Anyway, for fun, I use this makefile for producing love files:

Code: Select all

BUNDLE = yourprojectnamehere.love
FILES = conf.lua main.lua lib map gfx

love:
	zip -r $(BUNDLE) $(FILES)

To use it, I type make love

[Lafolie]

I find that to be a terribly odd response. You asked 'if there is better then why not upgrade', and I provided a reason. You seemed to contest this reason yet you listed features thus continuing my line of thought. I don't understand what you're talking about when you say "price" and "ad". You also mentioned an it with no context, and I have no idea what you're talking about regarding that "[your] view isn't as shallow as that".

[luaz]

I find that to be a terribly odd response. You asked 'if there is better then why not upgrade', and I provided a reason. You seemed to contest this reason yet you listed features thus continuing my line of thought. I don't understand what you're talking about when you say "price" and "ad". You also mentioned an it with no context, and I have no idea what you're talking about regarding that "[your] view isn't as shallow as that".

In that case, I don't know what you were talking about either.

[Inny]

I walked in during the middle of a fight, whoops.

By the way, quote Auto-completion, IntelliSense, interface, debugger /quote, I totally miss the Visual Studio debugger. I know gdb is really good, and it has front ends, and the ncurses one is pretty sweet, I've used it a lot. But the Visual Studio debugger is still better. It baffles me that buggy Windows apps exist when those programmers have such a great debugger.

[Jasoco]

I recently switched to Sublime Text 2 from TextWrangler. Liking it for the most part. It does have some things I miss from TW, but for the most part it's pretty cool. Don't know why there's no actual Preferences window. You have to edit a text file to change preferences, and all the color choices are in a menu that requires extra work to check out all the choices one at a time. I like the sidebar overview though. I started labeling some functions or sections with ASCII large text like Notch does so it's easy to notice when looking at the sidebar. But I still miss TW's pull-down list of all functions. Also it doesn't view images like TW does as images. Instead it shows it as if you opened an image in a text editor. So why even show the images in the files list on the left side if you can't actually view them? Weird.

Either way I like it for the most part.

[slime]

But I still miss TW's pull-down list of all functions.

Assuming OS X: cmd-r, or cmd-p and then @.

[Jasoco]

But I still miss TW's pull-down list of all functions.

Assuming OS X: cmd-r, or cmd-p and then @.

That is pretty awesome.

[BlackBulletIV]

I switched from TextMate to Sublime Text 2 two or three months ago. Really liking it so far.

But I still miss TW's pull-down list of all functions.

Assuming OS X: cmd-r, or cmd-p and then @.

That is pretty awesome.

You may want to check out the Tuts+ course on Sublime. It taught me quite a few things about the program.