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New IDE: code bubbles

cs.brown.edu

191–200 of 226 posts

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#191
post #110
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added. In fact, Emacs is an IDE... It's just not a mouse-based IDE. Mouse clicking makes my hands hurt much faster than using the keyboard. I also find it annoying to switch from mouse keyboard, so I don't want a UI that relies on constant mousing.

"Emacs can do whatever you want." Saying "Emacs can do whatever you want" is like saying "your computer can do anything you want." Sure it can, so long as you're willing to write the code to make it go. But my time is finite; I cannot be bothered to re-build environments that have already been implemented elsewhere.

The difference is just that for your IDE, someone had already written the code necessary to make it do what you want. That's not because the IDE is an IDE and Emacs is Emacs, it's just because someone happened to write that code for Emacs. My point was that this has nothing to do with Emacs vs IDEs.

It's true that some things are lacking, so it's too bad that whoever wrote the code that does your high-level syntactic analysis didn't make it independent enough that it could be used in other places than whatever IDE you were referring to.

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#192
post #136
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can your emacs editor construct hyperlinked call graphs showing all callers and callees of a given function? Will this call graph generation remain up to date as I edit files? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. Can your IDE read my mail? > Can Emacs give me a hyper-linked list of all usages of a given symbol and do it properly(lexical scope, etc.), not just doing a simple symbol search? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. C…

I apologize if people thought I was hostile. I thought I was just making an argument by pointing out several examples of things text editors like Emacs don't normally do that IDE's do well. You've proven me wrong, at least for the case of C/C++. I would still argue that Emacs itself is not an IDE. It's just an editor with a turing-complete scripting engine. However, you could definitely convince me that Emacs+CEDET i…

> I would still argue that Emacs itself is not an IDE. ... Emacs+CEDET is an IDE. It's just an editor with a turing-complete scripting engine.

This isn't helpful.

First of all, Emacs is an excellent IDE for Lisp and has a built-in debugger, sensitive completion and automatic documentation, while Visual Studio can't do any of those things you thought were important until you install Visual C/C++.

Is Visual Studio "just" a editor with a plugin system?

Why are you so interested in giving emacs such a negative label?

> I would be interested in seeing similar environments for C#/Java as well as for dynamic languages like ruby/python/php, which IDEs have also been handling very well lately.

For python, there's Ropemacs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropemacs.html

For perl, there's Sepia: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/SEANO/Sepia-0.97/Sepia.html

I don't program in C# or Java or Ruby or PHP regularly so I don't know about them off the top of my head.

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#193
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added. In fact, Emacs is an IDE... It's just not a mouse-based IDE. Mouse clicking makes my hands hurt much faster than using the keyboard. I also find it annoying to switch from mouse keyboard, so I don't want a UI that relies on constant mousing.

"Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added...." Um no. But if so, then someone better start busting a lisp to get emacs to make cute little bubbles. I'd love to see that.

They'd just be text-based little bubbles...

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#194
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added. In fact, Emacs is an IDE... It's just not a mouse-based IDE. Mouse clicking makes my hands hurt much faster than using the keyboard. I also find it annoying to switch from mouse keyboard, so I don't want a UI that relies on constant mousing.

Respectfully, I think you're avoiding the main point of the post to which you replied. Good keyboard navigation in an editor is valuable, and many IDEs have poor support for it. On this we can probably all agree. But as I read it, the grandparent post was about functionality. Modern IDEs have a level of semantic awareness that generic editors like Emacs don't, at least not without a prohibitive amount of effort to im…

You are right, my comment about mousing referred to the bubbles in the movie, which seems to be all about clicking and dragging. There's no reason any IDE can't put in keyboard shortcuts, but it's going to be hard with the bubbles.

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#196

I don't think there's any reason to put the default video embed at 1080p. Just wasted a lot of my bandwidth, honestly; I didn't make it full-screen or anything and would have been fine with 360/480p

It's great they put it up that way as that seems to be the native resolution the demo was recorded at. That way, you get the optimum display quality of the text. Since most of the screen stays the same much of the time, it isn't that much of a bandwidth waster after all even at the higher resolution.

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#197
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, I confess to being a little glib; however, I'm merely suggesting another way that people already commonly "see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth."' It's not nearly as slick as code bubbles, but it does work for many of the use cases suggested above.

Slickness is an underrated quality of good user interfaces.

... by users that have managed to master entirely text-based editors like emacs or vi to a degree that allows them to still be as productive as their brethren who moved on to slicker IDEs :)

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#198
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've seen a NullPointerException on some line that was constructed by someone who loves the list of methods that automagically pops up for the dot operator: foo.bar().baz().qux() ...Grrrrr!

If only there was some combinator for sequencing computations... then you could write: foo >>= bar >>= baz >>= quux and there would never be a NullPointerException, because the >>= function could react appropriately when null was encountered!

  $ irb
  >> def nil.method_missing *args
  >>   nil   
  >>   end 
  => nil
  >> a = nil
  => nil
  >> a.b.c.d
  => nil
  >>

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video highlighted an annoying feature of Squeak Smalltalk, where you get tiny little views of individual methods in their own window, which seems like a good idea until you actually try to do something complicated using it. It's pretty to watch though. The cool things there, in my opinion, were the code navigation pieces. Those are the things I actually think work better with tabbed files. In other news, yikes! I…

Those bubbles would have been a nightmare if they didn't relate to each other in such a clean way They have some great grouping features - snapping, colouring, pushing, connections with lines, naming groups.

Awesome UX ideas to possibly implement in iPad app.

Re: New IDE: code bubbles

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but when you're working on a project that uses only a few languages, specialised tools are always going to be much more effective, and you just update the tools as you update your choice of language(s). Jack of all trades is master of none, as the saying goes.

They're not. Most of your time is still spent editing text . Or if it isn't, you're not getting enough done. Any deficiencies in semantic understanding (that's what your brain is for, remember?) are made up for by the sheer speed a proficient user (and fast typist) can get out of a good editor. And while you only use one environment at a time, you probably use several over your career. I've used the same environment…

> Most of your time is still spent editing text. Or if it isn't, you're not getting enough done.

Are you sure? I would expect that the process of physically typing in the changes you want to make takes only a fairly small amount of time, certainly much less than understanding the code that will be changed or designing the new part.

However, the typing is just mechanical grunt-work that tends to distract from other areas. If it can be automated with good refactoring tools and the like and so minimize the distraction to the developer's thought process then so much the better.

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