IDE Question

[Fabio Zadrozny]

>> Now, following that route, many people call Eclipse is the 21st
>> century Emacs... ;-)
>>
>
> I don't want to kick off an editor war or anything, but I don't think
> that Eclipse is anywhere near being a 21st century emacs,

Peace! I'm far from starting any war too (I don't usually try to
convince anyone about choosing a tool, as I believe that there's no
such thing as the correct choice there, only different points of view
and experiences -- the right thing is trying for yourself and deciding
what you like better -- but at least I'm going to answer to some of
your comments to try to be informative here).

> unless
> there's been a whole lot of progress with it since the last time I
> used it. With emacs, I can have multiple files open in one window,
> with the window split (I don't remember eclipse being able to do this,
> although it allowed multiple files in their own tabs),

You should be able to have it.... having multiple views for the same
file: although it does that by doing a new editor, and then you can
place that new editor as you want -- below some existing, to the
right, etc -- or you can use an external plugin for something more
closer to what emacs has:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Implement_Split_File_Editor_Functionality_for_the_Eclipse_IDE
-- note: I don't personally use that -- usually I try to keep the
modules small ;-)

> and I can
> customize the actions of the editor on the fly, without restarting it,
> in a variant of LISP. That may be possible in Eclipse, I don't really
> know.

Depends on what you want:
http://fabioz.com/pydev/manual_articles_scripting.html (but that's
just one of lots of ways to customize it)

> I used to use Eclipse and pydev, but once I learned my way around
> emacs, I haven't gone back to it for anything. I probably would if I
> did any coding in Java - but I don't. I'm exponentially more
> productive with emacs while writing python code than I ever was with
> Eclipse.

I must say that I'm totally the other way around... even being
productive in emacs, there's really no comparison there for me
(disclaimer: I'm the author of Pydev, so, that's expected, but I know
many people that changed to it and say the same thing)

> Add to that the degree to which emacs is customizable (just about
> everything that the editor does can be customized, you can jump
> quickly to the source of the functions you're running while editing,
> you can easily patch behavior in before or after specific function
> calls, you can easily define keyboard macros and bind them to
> keystrokes, and / or save them for future use, you can easily create
> keystrokes that correspond to interactive filling out of templates -
> "skeletons", etc), and I really don't see how someone could think that
> Eclipse is anywhere near being a replacement for emacs.

The one thing I miss in Eclipse (for which I use notepad++) is the
macros, but that's about it... Everything else is highly customizable
for me in Eclipse / Pydev... everything else is there (templates,
keybindings, jumping through code: going fast to any file/definition
you want in your project, hyperlinking in console, etc)

Also, I don't think outside of Eclipse there's anything close to what
Mylyn gives you in terms of knowing what code is really important when
working on a task ( http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/ ).

> Not to mention that I don't need to have X installed to run emacs if I
> don't need it.
>
> I may be wrong about the capabilities of Eclipse, as I haven't used it
> in about a year, and emacs certainly has it's own set of quirks and
> annoyances - one of which being the very steep learning curve.

Eclipse also has that -- And I'm pretty sure that the more you use a
tool the more you get productive in it.

> Watching the screencasts linked in the blog post you linked to, I
> might prefer Eclipse to emacs if I wasn't very used to never touching
> a mouse, or if I was developing under windows. With my editing mindset
> the way it is right now, when I see that, I just see a lot of wasted
> screen space, and a lot of wasted time doing things like intellisense.
> Also, the blog post didn't really give any reasons as to _why_ the
> person switched over, other than that they were impressed with
> Eclipse.

I (almost) never do touch my mouse inside eclipse too ;-)

And yes, it's very subjective.

> Meh, I'm not talking trash on Eclipse - it's a fine tool if it fits
> how you work with text / code. It's just not for me, and I would feel
> crippled while using it if I switched back to it. I used IDEs like
> that for a few years, but after about a month and a half of using
> emacs, I haven't looked back. I even use it as my IRC client when I
> jump on IRC.

Yeap, having lots of plugins is something both emacs and eclipse have
-- and until now, living within Eclipse has been a pleasant journey to
me ;-)

Also, as I said in the other post, choosing where you'll develop it's
a highly subjective thing, so, the right thing to do is look the
options, try them and decide for yourself.

> I do think that people should try a variety of styles of editors to
> find what works best for them though - although it does take a lot of
> time to learn your way around 3 or 4 different editors, once you find
> what fits with you, you will probably get a huge boost in productivity.

Totally agree with that.

Cheers,

Fabio