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This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends

This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something. Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.

philbarr 13y ago
"column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.
- liquidise 13y ago
  Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.
ramchip 13y ago
What do you work on? I find there's a huge difference between languages and projects. I don't mind writing Haskell or Python in emacs, but I couldn't live without VS for our fairly large C++ project. Debugging without the IDE is a huge pain. Finding what functions call a given function, when many functions have the same name (so forget grep), is also something we use very very often to check what impact a change would have. That and "go to definition".
- fdr_cs 13y ago
  Well, I do develop C++ with Emacs, and I don't miss VS a single day. And you can 'Go to definition', 'find callers', etc, with other editors (Emacs, Sublime, SourceInsight, etc) ...
smrtinsert 13y ago
You're thinking in a text fashion and not an IDE. You don't need "multiple cursors" in Eclipse because you can right click the item Refactor name, and every instance across your entire project is correctly updated instantly. That works for variables in scope, or methods in a class, or class name references. This would be like multiple cursors on steroids if such a thing ever existed, but it wont since people use text editors mostly on languages that don't feature static typing so you can't do that kind of ultimate magic. Also you don't need snippets because it has (wait for it) templates! Sample thing, user definable complete with variables to interpolate just like Sublime Text. Been there before ST existed as a product. I think there is an Eclipse IDE education problem at work here. Discoverability seems to be really low.

philbarr 13y ago

"column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.

liquidise 13y ago
Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.

ramchip 13y ago

What do you work on? I find there's a huge difference between languages and projects. I don't mind writing Haskell or Python in emacs, but I couldn't live without VS for our fairly large C++ project. Debugging without the IDE is a huge pain. Finding what functions call a given function, when many functions have the same name (so forget grep), is also something we use very very often to check what impact a change would have. That and "go to definition".

fdr_cs 13y ago
Well, I do develop C++ with Emacs, and I don't miss VS a single day. And you can 'Go to definition', 'find callers', etc, with other editors (Emacs, Sublime, SourceInsight, etc) ...

smrtinsert 13y ago

You're thinking in a text fashion and not an IDE. You don't need "multiple cursors" in Eclipse because you can right click the item Refactor name, and every instance across your entire project is correctly updated instantly. That works for variables in scope, or methods in a class, or class name references. This would be like multiple cursors on steroids if such a thing ever existed, but it wont since people use text editors mostly on languages that don't feature static typing so you can't do that kind of ultimate magic. Also you don't need snippets because it has (wait for it) templates! Sample thing, user definable complete with variables to interpolate just like Sublime Text. Been there before ST existed as a product. I think there is an Eclipse IDE education problem at work here. Discoverability seems to be really low.