What I want in an editor/IDE

Jussi Jumppanen jussij at zeusedit.com
Wed Jul 21 22:38:26 EDT 2004


Chris Cioffi wrote:

> I do about 90% of my development on and for Win32.  The 
> rest is for Linux and usually done in vim through an ssh 
> login.

Take a look at Zeus for Windows:

   http://www.zeusedit.com/lookmain.html

Zeus will not run on Linux but it does have ftp editing 
with support for SSH and SSL/TLS.

> What Komodo has that I really like:
> -Projects - This is the difference between an editor and an IDE for
> me.  The ability to define a set of files as being logically related. 

Zeus has projects and workspaces. You can even add your ftp 
files to the project.

> We break up programs into modules/packages for 2 reasons:

In Zeus this is done using the workspace. The workspace represents
the overall program and then add individual modules and/or packages 
are represented by the individual projects added to the workspace. 

> -Debugger 

Zeus will run the external Python debugger internally. The debugger
integration could be better but it does work.

> -Simple (one or two key/click) way to run the program I'm 
> editing

Zeus has tools, macros, project debug and execute options all 
fully configurable that allow you to do this.

> -Syntax completion (Kinda...)

Zeus does automatic ctags management for all file in a 
workspace. It uses the ctags database for code completion
and for tag searching.

> -Post run access to the command interpretor.  

Zeus does not do this.

> -Built in, syntax aware, spell checker.  

Zeus only has the spell checker. It leaves the sytax checking
to the author and the compiler/interpreter :)

> -Code/class browser, should be doc string aware

Zeus has a project based class browser built from the ctags
database. It is not doc string aware. But it does integrate
with Doxygen, which does implify the project documention 
process.

> -The ability to import/export all settings from another 
> installation. I work on 2-3 machines and would like to 
> be able to sit down, point at a config and use that config.  

Just copy over the zConfig directory and you are done.

> If I point to an Internet based config it doesn't need to 
> be read/write, just give me "my" options for right now, 
> thank you very much.

Zeus has no internet config option, but the zConfig can be
network (ie LAN) based.

> -Sophisticated Python aware syntax highlighting  Beyond 
> just "this is string".  I'd like to have highlighting 
> distinguish between doc strings, normal strings and triple
> quoted strings.

Zeus comes pre-configured for python and the syntax highlighting
is fully configurable.

But "triple quoted strings" are NOT supported :(

> -Better command completion, like what ActiveState PythonWin 
> does. For instance, while it is frequently no possible to 
> know the class/type

Zeus only has code-completion for items in the tags database
so it probably does not have this.

But Zeus does have template code completion. This means
things like:

    if()<enter key here>

can be configured to complete to this:

    if()
    {
        |< cursor here
    }

The templates are fully configurable.

> -Ability to work through an SSH shell. I can deal with losing 
> some debugging capability, although I'd prefer to be able to 
> have the IDE open it's own remote shell and execute remotely.

Zeus does not do this.

> -Ability to build extensions in Python would be slick.  

Zeus has a full macro scripting lanaguage. Zeus scripts
can be written in Python, Lua, JavaScript, VBScript, even 
RubyScript.

> -Built-in UML to code outline builder.  At least a graphical code
> structure designer.  (At the object/function/module/package level.)

Zeus does not have this.

> -GUI designer?  With all the GUI tool kits/langauges this might 
> not be reasonable except as a plug in...

Zeus does not have this.

> -Support for version control systems.  This probably needs to 
> be a plug in kind of thing so it can support CVS, Subversion, 
> et al.

Zeus has support for any SCC compliant version control, which
is nealy all of them.

It also comes with "out of the box" support for CVS.

> What features do you think make a great coding system?  

Just some:

  1) Fast start times
  2) Fast file load times
  3) Fast keyboard response times
  4) Configurable keyboard mappings
  5) Stable

Jussi Jumppanen
Author of: Zeus for Windows (New version 3.93 out now)
"The C/C++, Cobol, Java, HTML, Python, PHP, Perl programmer's editor"
Home Page: http://www.zeusedit.com



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