Loosely-coupled development environment (was: IDE Question)

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:47:36 +1100, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> "Steve Phillips" <steve077 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I am just wondering what seems to be the most popular IDE. The
>> reason I ask is I am currently at war with myself when it comes to
>> IDE's. It seems like every one I find and try out has something in
>> it that others don't and viceversa.
>
> This speaks to the twin facts that people want different things, and
> that Python is flexible enough to accommodate these differing desires.
>
>> I am in search for the perfect IDE
>
> Perfect for whom, exactly? Perfect for what, exactly?
>
> These are not facetious questions: they cut to the core of your quest.
> I am convinced that your quest for a development environment that is
> ?integrated? (or ?tightly-coupled?, in programming terminology) is
> incompatible with any useful criterion of ?perfect?.
>
> Instead, I find the greater gain comes from a working environment of
> *loosely-coupled* tools, with standard well-defined interfaces, that
> one can flexibly mold and reconnect to meet whatever task is at hand.
> The deeper this extends into the operating system, the more the system
> as a whole will be able to support this flexibility, and the more
> likely the tools will have been designed to do so.
>
> Because of the inescapable central role in our craft of manipulating
> text files, essential in this development environment is a
> highly-customisable text editor with a broad *and* deep library of
> existing customisations, to maximise the amount of work already done
> for you when embarking on work in an area that is, to you, new.
>
> It happens that the text editors which meet these criteria are limited
> to Emacs and Vim, with a sharp decline in suitability (by these
> criteria) beyond those two. Both have powerful user-customisable
> capabilities and a mammoth availability of existing extensions for a
> staggering variety of tasks. Learn one of these editors well,
> familiarise yourself with how to access the rich library of available
> extensions, and make the text editor the core of your loosely-coupled
> development environment.

You think like I think, but I think your standards are too high. I
like claiming "my IDE is Emacs and Unix", but in fact I know very
little about how to customize Emacs using elisp -- I have added a few
keyboard shortcuts, made it use a readable font, and disabled a few
silly features, but that's about it.  I use a Unix shell on the side
to do the non-editing tasks which I guess you train your editor to do.

So, my requirements on the editor boils down to:

- free and universally available
- will still be around when I'm dead
- capable as a pure text editor
- support for colorizing Python code (at least strings and comments)
- helps me indenting Python code
- support for other languages

I hope many editors fulfill those criteria, except maybe the first
two.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@        Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/     snipabacken.se>          R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!