[Kc] editors and IDEs (was: May Meeting)

Andrew Moore amoore at mooresystems.com
Wed May 7 12:57:52 PDT 2008


On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 02:35:04PM -0500, Sterling Hanenkamp wrote:
> I guess I don't understand what's limited about either vim or emacs. Both

They don't understand perl, so it is limited in its ability to help me
write it better. It can't make completion suggestions based on my
current context. It can't help me refactor my code very well. It can't
do a lot of things that an active editor for other languages can do.

For instance, if I have a CGI object, which is an object with a
"param" method, I should be able to type:

$cgi->par

and it should offer "param" as a completion to that. Maybe I have to
hit my "autocomplete" button (M-/), or maybe if I pause it just offers
a little drop-down of options (think "Google Suggests"), but it should
know that "param" is an option, and "parmesan" is not. (Maybe it
should also know that that method takes 0 or 1 parameters.)

If if I have just defined a hash with a set of keys in it, and I type
the first half of one of the keys, it should suggest some of the keys
as possible completions.

Or, If I start typing a bare word, it may suggest some of the subs in
the current package or core as options.

Some other languages have editors that do some of these things. Perl
doesn't really (yet).

-Andy





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