No mention of ctags. I use that more than anything to navigate around files in emacs: M-. SomeIdentifier takes you straight to the definition. I hardly care which file its in.
I prefer cscope & vim, but yes, I often have no idea what file I'm in.
Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#82A pretty, re-invented, better Emacs would nice.
Till one exists use the current emacs.
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#83Uh..have you never heard of IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse? Or RubyMine? Or Netbeans even...
They pretty much do everything you're talking about.
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#84One solution: Use fewer files. I try to keep the number of files and folders for a project to as few as possible. Then you spend much less time opening and searching for files. As more people get involved with a project, you'll have more files, but you should make an active effort to keep the numbers minimized. Here's a little script I wrote to give quick stats on a project's size: http://breckyunits.com/metrics_for_…
> Use fewer files. Why? What does that have to do with text editing capabilities? The number of files depends (or at least should) on what you do, not on how bad your tools are. If you limit the number of files to limit the file-opening time, you increase the fragment-searching time in the gigantic-file-of-doom. Also you lose the possibility to make local one-file changes which are self-explanatory if you look at the…
The OP complains that:
> For most programming tasks, editing involves opening several files at once and switching between them (e.g. HTML/JavaScript/CSS).
His idea of a solution is for better file navigation.
My claim is that often the real problem is a bloated set of files and directories in a project.
I find when the set of files is small, opening and switching between them is much faster and more productive.
This applies particularly to the beginning of a project. As classes/files mature, then I recommend splitting them up into more files.
For example, when starting a new MVC project I'll create one models file. All the models go in there at first because the project will be heavily edited.
Once it's become more stable, I'll split it into a file for each model/class.
This way when you make small changes you'll have the VCS history benefit you mention, but often you don't really need that at the beginning of a project.
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#85Typical designer. "Oh no, my text editor displays its status to me using text." Yeah. Some people get their eye-candy feed from lolcat videos, and then use their tools for work. (My desktop doesn't even have wobbly windows! Just a 1-px red border! How can I get any work done that way!) Also, I'm fairly certain that eproject gets rid of the "wall of text" that disqualifies Emacs. In a perl project, for example, I can…
Constantly mentioning how you're using a tiling wm is the new constantly mentioning you don't have a TV.
Ah, the Rubyists are here.
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#86Uh..have you never heard of IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse? Or RubyMine? Or Netbeans even... They pretty much do everything you're talking about.
Yeah, why was the OP upvoted? Are there seriously that many people on Hacker News who have never used a real ide?
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone wants to be Dustin Curtis. Still, the author calling HN posters Neanderthals was a nice touch.
Joy Division was a great band, although I thought the lead singer died in the 80’s.
Disambiguation:
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#88I use Acme, it's got a smashing way to browse, open, and manage files.
Agreed. It's hard to beat an editor where you can run find, grep or whatever shell command you like, and the output becomes a clickable menu.
Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#89Re: Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
#90Did anyone ever think that maybe the problem is the FILES?
Let me ask that one more time. Would people be ranting like this if there were NO FILES?
I still believe the "future of programming" is where your code objects are not arbitrarily mapped onto files in the file system, you just manipulate them directly!
A few Smalltalks and Lisps out there do this using image-based development. This is where it's at. If you can't use a image-based Smalltalk or Lisp to get your work done, then use a JetBrains/Eclipse IDE. They're generally modeled off of the Smalltalk IDE and are the next best thing if you're forced to use a broken file-based language.
If you just take "files" for granted and think that the UNIX design philosophy is the best thing ever, then accept your fate and stop bitching.