6 ms·

I don't do a whole lot of software (got caught up on the hardware side of things), but one thing I'm noticing is that nobody makes extensive use of "advanced"

I don't do a whole lot of software (got caught up on the hardware side of things), but one thing I'm noticing is that nobody makes extensive use of "advanced" IDE features as in eclipse or visual Studio. Is this personal taste, or has it to do with the scope of the projects these guys are working on?

detaro 11y ago
The selection of people certainly makes it less likely that they use IDEs that look like Eclipse or VS. But the editor windows you are seeing may look plain, but I bet most of them have quite fancy features set up, that do a lot of "IDE"-stuff.
- shoover 11y ago
  Yeah, it would be interesting to see how Bram gets around the vim source code, for example.
BrandonBradley 11y ago
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion unless I observed how people use it in real-time. For verbose languages, you can't beat auto-completion and auto-import.
- creshal 11y ago
  > For verbose languages, you can't beat auto-completion and auto-import. And you can get both in vim, emacs, etc. The lines between those and full IDEs are blurry with the right (or wrong) amount of plugins.
  - izacus 11y ago
    The autocompletion in both vim and emacs was always significantly worse than any IDE-based ones, no matter the plugin I tried (for C, C++, Python or Go). Most of them are pretty much limited to ctags with no context matching, others simply died on projects beyond trivial.
    - to3m 11y ago
      For C/C++ and emacs, try rtags: https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags It's clang-based, so suffers from none of the tags-type issues: it's context-sensitive, and can see straight through gnarly stuff such as identifiers generated by token pasting. Good points: - Only mildly fiddly to set up - Code browsing works well - Code completion works well when it works - Cute gcc/g++/etc. wrapper trick means you don't have to change any build settings Bad points: - Making it work with code you haven't built yourself on your local system (e.g., 3rd party stuff that's not complete, code for another platform) is less straightforward - Code completion sometimes doesn't work with certain files (and for no reason that I've ever been able to figure out) - It's probably my own limitations but I found it extremely inconvenient to debug (internally it's surprisingly complicated: separate client and server, lots of lengthy command lines, client code writes elisp code to stdout and elisp in emacs eats it up, the actual completion popup is a separate package, etc.)
    - DrJokepu 11y ago
      I never managed to get it working in vim, but you can get pretty decent auto Go completion (with Go oracle) in Emacs.
    - rmcpherson 11y ago
      For go auto completion in vim, vim-go with youcompleteme works well for me. It's not tags-based, based on the source AST, shows method signatures as well.
    - bdisraeli 11y ago
      Cider (for Clojure) and Ensime (for Scala) give you excellent support for auto-completion, documentation, and refactoring in Emacs. It's definitely possible, so it probably just depends on how popular Emacs/Vim are in your language community.
  - simula67 11y ago
    Not all auto-completions are equal. I have felt that Intellij's auto-completion is far superior to vim's YouCompleteMe. There are many other advantages like out of the box support for a lot of common use cases like refactoring, navigation, build tool support, reuse common shortcuts like Control-C Control-V for copy-paste etc. I would definitely advice new engineers coming into languages like Java to pick up an IDE like Intellij instead of vim.
    - Roboprog 11y ago
      Intellij with vim plugin :-) I like how you can use command keys to quickly toggle on and off the project file and current-file's-components browsers, leaving the "distraction free" * editor window for much of your work. * yeah, there's a mode with this name that auto-wacks ALL the supplemental panels, AND the window frame. I don't usually go that far, but it does show that they "get it" as far as what many of us IDE resisters disliked.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
For me, IDEs are great for when I have to do boilerplate coding. But when I switch to real business logic I use an editor like vi or sublime. Anything more impedes my thinking and gets in my way.
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  I'm guessing you're probably not writing unit test or use code coverage plugins or running static code analysis to provide feedback incrementally and quickly?
  - aaronem 11y ago
    What has any of those things to do with someone's choice of editor?
    - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
      I take it you've never used those IDE with the plugins to support the workflow I mentioned above...
      - aaronem 11y ago
        Well, it depends on what you mean, I suppose. I've integrated Emacs with tools like those, so that I can (for example) get linting feedback on code in real time, or jump to locations from a unit test failure report. But I've never written unit tests, or used coverage or static analysis tools, that depended on Emacs, or indeed on any other editor. I've never even seen that kind of tight coupling, much less perpetrated it myself. I'm not sure whether that's what you're talking about, or whether it only sounds like that's what you're talking about, but I hope it's the latter.
        edwinnathaniel 11y ago
        There are 2 workflows here: 1. the ability to run everything (a.k.a the whole project) using the preferred SCM (or build tools) for example: mvn clean install where your pom.xml already set to have cobertura (code coverage), checkstyle/pmd (linting/style/formatting), and findbugs (static code analysis) 2. the ability to run a very specific unit-test somewhere deep down in your project via your IDE as you're writing code (the IDE compiles your code on the fly...) and get everything I mentioned above :) for example: I want to run one new unit-test for a new code => I don't have to drop to my console/command-line/terminal to run mvn clean install. I just go to my unit-test, highlight the method name, run it through eclipse/intellij and I get everything.
papito 11y ago
I did VI for over 10 years, and now I tried IntelliJ Python integration, and my rate of making stupid errors and wasting valuable time has gone down dramatically. Lightning-fast navigation across files, actually working autocomplete, live code style analysis. To be fair, I tried it before and was unimpressed, but in come cases, modern IDE's are becoming superior. And note that it's out of the box - setting up and trying different plugins just seems annoying in the least.

detaro 11y ago

The selection of people certainly makes it less likely that they use IDEs that look like Eclipse or VS. But the editor windows you are seeing may look plain, but I bet most of them have quite fancy features set up, that do a lot of "IDE"-stuff.

shoover 11y ago
Yeah, it would be interesting to see how Bram gets around the vim source code, for example.

BrandonBradley 11y ago

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion unless I observed how people use it in real-time. For verbose languages, you can't beat auto-completion and auto-import.

creshal 11y ago
> For verbose languages, you can't beat auto-completion and auto-import. And you can get both in vim, emacs, etc. The lines between those and full IDEs are blurry with the right (or wrong) amount of plugins.
- izacus 11y ago
  The autocompletion in both vim and emacs was always significantly worse than any IDE-based ones, no matter the plugin I tried (for C, C++, Python or Go). Most of them are pretty much limited to ctags with no context matching, others simply died on projects beyond trivial.
  - to3m 11y ago
    For C/C++ and emacs, try rtags: https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags It's clang-based, so suffers from none of the tags-type issues: it's context-sensitive, and can see straight through gnarly stuff such as identifiers generated by token pasting. Good points: - Only mildly fiddly to set up - Code browsing works well - Code completion works well when it works - Cute gcc/g++/etc. wrapper trick means you don't have to change any build settings Bad points: - Making it work with code you haven't built yourself on your local system (e.g., 3rd party stuff that's not complete, code for another platform) is less straightforward - Code completion sometimes doesn't work with certain files (and for no reason that I've ever been able to figure out) - It's probably my own limitations but I found it extremely inconvenient to debug (internally it's surprisingly complicated: separate client and server, lots of lengthy command lines, client code writes elisp code to stdout and elisp in emacs eats it up, the actual completion popup is a separate package, etc.)
  - DrJokepu 11y ago
    I never managed to get it working in vim, but you can get pretty decent auto Go completion (with Go oracle) in Emacs.
  - rmcpherson 11y ago
    For go auto completion in vim, vim-go with youcompleteme works well for me. It's not tags-based, based on the source AST, shows method signatures as well.
  - bdisraeli 11y ago
    Cider (for Clojure) and Ensime (for Scala) give you excellent support for auto-completion, documentation, and refactoring in Emacs. It's definitely possible, so it probably just depends on how popular Emacs/Vim are in your language community.
- simula67 11y ago
  Not all auto-completions are equal. I have felt that Intellij's auto-completion is far superior to vim's YouCompleteMe. There are many other advantages like out of the box support for a lot of common use cases like refactoring, navigation, build tool support, reuse common shortcuts like Control-C Control-V for copy-paste etc. I would definitely advice new engineers coming into languages like Java to pick up an IDE like Intellij instead of vim.
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    Intellij with vim plugin :-) I like how you can use command keys to quickly toggle on and off the project file and current-file's-components browsers, leaving the "distraction free" * editor window for much of your work. * yeah, there's a mode with this name that auto-wacks ALL the supplemental panels, AND the window frame. I don't usually go that far, but it does show that they "get it" as far as what many of us IDE resisters disliked.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

For me, IDEs are great for when I have to do boilerplate coding. But when I switch to real business logic I use an editor like vi or sublime. Anything more impedes my thinking and gets in my way.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago
I'm guessing you're probably not writing unit test or use code coverage plugins or running static code analysis to provide feedback incrementally and quickly?
- aaronem 11y ago
  What has any of those things to do with someone's choice of editor?
  - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
    I take it you've never used those IDE with the plugins to support the workflow I mentioned above...
    - aaronem 11y ago
      Well, it depends on what you mean, I suppose. I've integrated Emacs with tools like those, so that I can (for example) get linting feedback on code in real time, or jump to locations from a unit test failure report. But I've never written unit tests, or used coverage or static analysis tools, that depended on Emacs, or indeed on any other editor. I've never even seen that kind of tight coupling, much less perpetrated it myself. I'm not sure whether that's what you're talking about, or whether it only sounds like that's what you're talking about, but I hope it's the latter.
      - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
        There are 2 workflows here: 1. the ability to run everything (a.k.a the whole project) using the preferred SCM (or build tools) for example: mvn clean install where your pom.xml already set to have cobertura (code coverage), checkstyle/pmd (linting/style/formatting), and findbugs (static code analysis) 2. the ability to run a very specific unit-test somewhere deep down in your project via your IDE as you're writing code (the IDE compiles your code on the fly...) and get everything I mentioned above :) for example: I want to run one new unit-test for a new code => I don't have to drop to my console/command-line/terminal to run mvn clean install. I just go to my unit-test, highlight the method name, run it through eclipse/intellij and I get everything.

papito 11y ago

I did VI for over 10 years, and now I tried IntelliJ Python integration, and my rate of making stupid errors and wasting valuable time has gone down dramatically. Lightning-fast navigation across files, actually working autocomplete, live code style analysis. To be fair, I tried it before and was unimpressed, but in come cases, modern IDE's are becoming superior. And note that it's out of the box - setting up and trying different plugins just seems annoying in the least.