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Putting the I back in IDE

blog.janestreet.com

121–130 of 152 posts

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#121
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it felt so constraining not having a tree view and tabs I could click on There are emacs packages for tree views[0] and tabs[1], but as you note the built-in buffer management is more powerful. Stuff like Helm or Ivy is even better! There's also an emacs uuidgen package, which can generate a uuid & insert it with M-x uuidgen; you could of course bind it to a key sequence if you use it frequently. 0: https://github.…

Thous things are pretty much things to avoid in my opinion. I used to have NERDTree in Vim and all kind of other useless nonsense. After I learned how to use fuzzy searching to jump between files and definitions all tree view does is take up space. Even with Atom finding files is way faster than clicking through the tree viewer.

I agree re. tree views, but was merely noting that they exist, if one really wants them. rms may be doctrinaire, but emacs is not!

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#122
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be interested in magithub (it’s on MELPA).

Is there something similar for Bitbucket and JIRA? We're stuck with those and the web UI's are very slow.

That’s not the UI’s fault - the JIRA backend is slow.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but their internal tools use 80*25 text-mode UIs A long time ago, I worked for a company wanting to sell advertising devices with an accompanying booking UI to Titan - we had a shiny web booking system; they had their crufty old 80x25 text mode system. Turns out that 80x25 text mode system was orders of magnitude faster for the day to day workflow of booking ads on devices, etc.

Indeed. I've seen two AS/400 via Telnet(-like) systems replaced with a modern GUI (first case) and a web based GUI (second case) and aside from all the usual problems associated with an en masse migration they ended up been far slower for the end user. TUI's with complete keyboard shortcuts are just hard to beat for domain specific software. Things like "Click Orders - Click Open - Click Create New Order" vs SHIFT+F9…

Nothing to stop you adding the Shift+F9 shortcut to the gui.

Gui's are often preferred for the speed at which new hires can use them. In environments with high turnover this is important. You can have the best of both worlds with a GUI that has good shortcuts and clever cursor placement. I agree though that most gui implementations have not put enough effort into this.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#124
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of emacs is that it is extensible, and easily so. That is the core thing that makes emacs great. And it means that, far from having extensions that are inferior to those on IDEs, it has many extensions that are far, far superior to the IDE equivalents. For example, magit I find a far superior git extension than the IDE equivalents. Something like org-mode simply has no rival in the world of IDEs, it i…

For some (a lot of?) things that's true. But at that point you're basically writing your own stuff, just using a framework. You get the flexibility, but you're also "responsible" for making its level match up with that of something someone was probably paid to do (and that someone else is not always incompetent :) ). Regarding macros, I agree. However in the languages supported by the IDE, I rarely find that I need m…

This => "But at that point you're basically writing your own stuff, just using a framework."

is what makes Emacs so comfortable for me. In fact, that was a moment of revelation when I found that Emacs is not an editor as they said, but a platform to build your editor/IDE/environment. Probably, it is because my brain is trained to think in a programming way, it feels much more natural to tune everything by coding, then by knobs, and buttons. And, yes, it provides more extensibility. I mean, for real. That's why I, as many before me, started to do a lot of things unrelated to programming in Emacs - because I can make it to assist me better, in ways unachievable with other software, in spite of the fact that the latter could be specially developed for a purpose.

I don't proclaim Emacs is the panacea for everything, it has it's ugly sides too. I just want to say if you like to rule you working environment, not just learn how to live with it - Emacs can offer you something.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give emacs a shot. Both Prelude & spacemacs are excellent configs for it. Are there any advantages over Visual Studio + Visual Assist, for C++ or C# languages? Because I see many disadvantages. About text editor features, your workarounds have flaws compared to good GUI. For tooltips, that special region of the terminal is physically separate from the cursor. For folding, a separate, visually distinct indicators of…

> Are there any advantages over Visual Studio + Visual Assist, for C++ or C# languages? A fully-extensible, flexible environment which anyone (even a secretary!) can easily extend. > About text editor features, your workarounds have flaws compared to good GUI. They're not workarounds; they are the features. emacs has a GUI. I repeat: emacs has a GUI . Tooltips in a GUI display as you'd expect. Folding in a GUI displa…

> which anyone (even a secretary!) can easily extend

Even if that’s true, we’re talking about development environments here, so secretaries are irrelevant. I’ve been programming C++ and C# for decades, for me, visual studio is quite flexible and extensible.

> Terminals support underlines

I specifically told about wavy red underlines for spell checking, and terminals don’t support that. Simple underlines are too intrusive i.e. they often mask '_', and don’t stand out visually from normal text.

> It's more than an editor; it connects to build systems like make, maven, gradle, ant, what-have-you.

I know it’s possible to integrate everything in Linux ecosystem. I just don’t want to waste my time connecting, integrating, and then supporting the setup that just works out of the box on Windows, with freeware visual studio.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#126
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without impatience/ignorance/incompetence. It's very hard to follow what everybody's doing. Seriously hard. Everyday people are making stuff, and have been doing so for 50 years. I'm a regular emacs user and I keep being surprised by new modes/extensions that I never heard of, but were released 2 years ago -_-;

True, my comment was a bit mean/dismissive. People do have to stop chasing the trends, cause that's a full time job. And it's easy to not notice productivity gains you've missed for years. In my opinion Emacs/Vim: - except for some specific roles: Emacs -> Lisp development, Vim -> to be honest, not sure what to say, what is Vim's strong suit? except for core editing commands - and unless you put in a ton of hours int…

To keep it brief (mobile keyboards suck): Vim’s strong suit is editing text. That’s all.

But, and it’s a big but, that’s enough. As a vim user, I have the rest of the shell and browsers for the rest of my development environment. Version control: git. Building and testing tools: make (or similar). Debugging: gdb, pdb, the browsers debugger.

Lots of single purpose tools that operate cleanly and so integrate into my personal workflow easily. Every time I’ve picked up an ide, I’ve been disappointed by the compromises which were made to make it “integrated”.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#127
post #23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started using Emacs in a tiling window manager on Linux after using "standard" GUI editors like PyCharm, AppCode, Atom, VSCode, etc. on macOS. At first, I felt exactly like you describe - it felt so constraining not having a tree view and tabs I could click on. But after a while I got used to using a keyboard shortcut to quickly jump between files or search for a file to open. I'm slowly getting used to it…

> it felt so constraining not having a tree view and tabs I could click on There are emacs packages for tree views[0] and tabs[1], but as you note the built-in buffer management is more powerful. Stuff like Helm or Ivy is even better! There's also an emacs uuidgen package, which can generate a uuid & insert it with M-x uuidgen; you could of course bind it to a key sequence if you use it frequently. 0: https://github.…

Thanks for the suggestions. I knew about tree views for Emacs, but I usually work with Emacs and a terminal side-by-side on a 13" laptop screen, so a tree view just takes up extra space and I ended up not missing it much. As for the uuidgen package, this was just a one-time thing for a few uuids, so using the uuidgen command I already had installed on Linux was simplier.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#128
post #53
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started using Emacs in a tiling window manager on Linux after using "standard" GUI editors like PyCharm, AppCode, Atom, VSCode, etc. on macOS. At first, I felt exactly like you describe - it felt so constraining not having a tree view and tabs I could click on. But after a while I got used to using a keyboard shortcut to quickly jump between files or search for a file to open. I'm slowly getting used to it…

And with pycharm you'd have simply used a generator preset for uuids. There's even a dozen of generator presets integrated, you can just easily invoke them from your keyboard, without pressing all modifier keys at once. And PyCharm even has all the keyboard navigation as well, you can even get emacs or vi keybindings, if you wish, I only use the mouse when the app's already running and I'm going through the log.

PyCharm is great, and I use it along with AppCode and Android Studio. I'm mainly trying to learn Emacs because so many people have great things to say about it, plus I've started using Org Mode for todos and notes and it's awesome. In addition, I've tried using the VIM emulation in the Jetbrains IDEs and have always ended up turning it off each time as I kept forgetting I was in VIM mode and would try to use the editor like a normal editor. Emacs with Evil mode is different enough that I don't try to mix VIM and regular editor usage.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#129
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're motivated enough, don't switch. Just fire up a VM. Unixen are generally the same, but you won't figure that out at first, so you do want something a bit friendlier. My personal opinion would be to go with the mainstream distributions, since you want support from fellow humans on chat, forums, etc. I'm more of an Ubuntu guy, but people seem to like and use Mint or Debian or Fedora. Don't fall into an A…

Could go even easier by installing Git for Windows and using the included bash prompt. It's a MinGW environment with very good factory configurations. It won't let you apt-get and run any old app, but it does get you all the goodness of a bash prompt and all the standard Unix command-line apps. All right there in Windows, without having to also learn and get comfortable in a new operating system.

If he has Windows 10 he could even go WSL, forgot about it.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#130
post #56

Programming like 1980! At least has colors instead of having everything in green. Really the extent people go to avoid using modern developer tools.

emacs is a modern developer tool. Its most recent version is just about to be released. It supports all major and several minor OSes. It's used by modern developers (e.g. the folks at Jane Street …).

And, unlike some of its competitors, it's free and easily user-extensible.

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