One with Vim

For what it's worth, I've always found Microsoft APIs to vary profoundly in terms of usability and (especially) documentation. And MSDN hasn't been directly useful to me since the VS 6.0 days.

Can you give me an example of an editor with better text column editing? I'm not entirely sure what you mean.

Only about half-so. The first paragraph was all about VS exclusively, minus "too many warnings". But due to the issues in .NET, you essentially must use Visual Studio, which makes it at least bearable due to intellisense. But I crash VS fairly often, it eats up a half-gig or more of memory fairly often, it thrashes my hard drive to bits all the time so everything else crawls, and at one job the visual designer started executing code. Those database-filled combo boxes started querying the database right in the designer. This happened 3 or 4 times over a couple months, and could have been catastrophic if any of the times it happened occurred on deleting fields. I will never hook a database directly up to VS, I'll guarantee you that; this was executing our bound events. Imagine if we actually had direct connections to the DB.

So, one that's more specific to VS: the idiotic Web Site "projects" that have zero capabilities, and not even before / after build events to hot-wire your own in. And I dare you to try compiling documentation on a Web Site project. People have been asking for it and attempting to hot-wire their own for years, and they use gigabytes of memory to parse small projects and choke after an hour and give up without anything more helpful than "MSBuild.exe encountered an unexpected error". I suspect very much that the slowness of the only decent help builders is due to the horrendous reflection side of .NET, but that's not VS's fault. Except that VS wants VS-style documentation and won't accept anything else, but nobody can use it.

And, because it's particularly bad, I'll point to the JavaScript support again (2008. I hear 2010 is a bit better). It throws fits and doesn't always even index global functions you just declared (it's entirely broken on the site I'm working on, it simply refuses to parse anything not in assemblies), Intellisense tries to change "$()" to "$addEventHandler()" as you type, and it has the absolute worst indentation of any code editor in existence. None would be better, but it occasionally decides you're not neat enough and imposes "order" on your nicely readable function.

edit: Ooh! Another one! It's such fun to use VS in a multiple-monitor setup. Either you use the annoying "Multiple Document" layout (inner-windows that waste tons of space and fall behind things when the docked windows change), or you use tabs and can't spread to a second screen effectively. Or you launch two versions, and have them throw fits when you build in one, and the other sees things changing. And there is no higher joy than editing web.config while two instances of the same project are running, and watching the Visual Studio hit the fan.

--- I feel better. Thanks :)

Nearly any other programming editor, really. Notepad++ is a good example though, and doesn't require install, so I'd suggest experimenting with that.

In VS: hold alt and select a box of text. Note that you can't select less than a single space wide. You can copy, paste, and delete it. Now try hitting space, or typing something: the whole set is erased, and you start entering text at the top-left corner of what you had selected.

In nearly any other editor: hold alt and select a box. Note that you can select a column "0" wide. Copy, paste, and delete work as expected. But start typing; the vast majority I've used will fill the entire column as you type with what you're typing. Backspace removes line by line after the initial replacement. You edit the column, and everything you do is duplicated to the other lines you had the selection in.

It'd be especially useful for .NET as damn near every useful method returns void: want to populate a list with a few items? Select a few columns, type "list.Add(" and you're most of the way there. Plenty of times the refactoring tools (as good as they are in non-VB languages) don't work if you're not changing everything, and having a column editor would make things a lot faster. Besides, they have half a solution working; why did they stop at the nearly-useless step?

Another handy thing many programming text editors will do, but VS does not: soft-tabs go away with a back-space to the next tab-stop (if you start at one). In VS: keep hitting until you reach what might be another tab stop, there are no indicators for such things. Happy counting!

As to copy/paste, does that depend on the platform? I use vim in a terminal on Linux and Ctl+Shft+C/Ctl+Shft+V on selected text works fine for clipboard transfers. I don't use vim on Windows often enough to remember how things work there, however, and the article that prompted this discussion was focused on Mac usage.