[Phoenix-pm] Survey: IDE

[Scott Walters]

In my opinion, your energies are best spent learning either vi or EMACS.
Being able to automate reptition in your editing and perform complex 
operations with few keystrokes is more important than having documentation
slightly more readily accessible. Maybe you're spending 80% of your time
reading documentation right now, but in a few years, you'll be spending
most of your time reworking code, debugging, refactoring -- and editing,
in general. All of the little information displays and data read-outs
in the world won't save you. Heck, I even compose email in vi ;) I can
move a word, sentence, or paragraph with a few keystrokes, without
having to reach for the mouse, and without having to aim some little
cursor. More often than not, things get moved using line offsets, patterns,
or a mixture of both, rather than through any explicit arrowing over.
Block indenting, unindenting, commenting, and uncommenting are also 
few keystroke operations that take about a second.

And maybe it's just me (apparently so), but syntax highlighting is only
distracting. Discerning the algorithm, flow of execution, soundness of the 
design, security of the implemetnation, etc is far more difficult and far more
interesting than parsing the syntax of any given line. So, the effect on
me is that of relaxation music when I'm stressed for a good reason and
want to continue being stressed.

If the editor were smart enough to dim the exceptions, checks, debug 
statements, etc, and only leave the main algorithm, that might be somewhat
helpful. 

-scott

On  0, Brock <awwaiid at thelackthereof.org> wrote:
> 
> vim, gvim, or gvim-win32, depending on the context. I've slowly built up
> some minor customizations and shortcuts, but most of its just setting
> defaults.
> 
> One of my favorites is tab-completion (ctrl-n by default gets you most
> of the way there) -- it isn't language-aware and doesn't have to be, it
> just goes off of what other keywords I've already typed in any open
> file. Simple and very effective. That and auto-indent (indent to
> whatever the line before was indented... again, not language aware and I
> like it that way) make me a happy brock.
> 
> Debugging? print "here!\n" + Data::Dumper :)
> 
> --Brock
> 
> On 2005.09.02.16.19, Craig Frooninckx wrote:
> |    Okay, lets take a survey, who's using what IDE for development...
> 
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