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Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

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Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#71

Post by rreeves »

walexander wrote: post #66
rreeves wrote: post #39

Emacs for me. Here's my setup: Emacs, DDMS + JSwat, and ant to build. I have emacs and a terminal open at all times. To build I switch over to the terminal and use ant. Sometimes I'll write a shell script to build+install+run on a phone. For directory navigation: nav - http://code.google.com/p/emacs-nav/ For code completion: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JavaCompletion Building on the command line is simple. Type an…

Emacs here, too. high five My setup is essentially Emacs, DDMS and cscope/find/grep/etc. I always find Eclipse to be too heavy. I don't do much actual UI coding though (I'm a platform guy), or I might consider it. The ADT UI tools seem to be very powerful and convenient.

Right on. Glad to hear other people are using Emacs too. =)

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#72

Post by liljimmytables »

num1 wrote: post #17

Slightly unrelated, but why does everybody insist on calling it vi(m)? I have never seen a box that used vi in lieu of vim, it seems to be a historical artifact.

It's an interesting point. Mentally, I think of vi as meaning "a member of the set of vien" (from "emacsen").

Also, I never type that extra "m" so why should I say it?

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#73

Post by l0st3d »

angryasian wrote: post #52
Xuzz wrote: post #8

As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE? I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.

are people complaining about eclipse because it starts up slow ? After initial startup, what are the issues that cause this person to be scared of using an IDE ?

Eclipse is frankly a poor text editor. After learning enough Emacs to get comfortable, it becomes clear that there is a better way. For example, undo. In Eclipse, type something, undo it and type something else. Now you can't use the undo/redo function to get the first thing that you typed back. In Emacs, you can, since undo is an undoable operation. Similarly, having things like i-search, align-regex and rectangle editing have become vital for editing code. These things either do not exist, or are difficult to discover or use in things like Eclipse.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#74

Post by biafra »

ozchrisb wrote: post #34
ajross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is command line deployment horrible? Write some scripts, copy stuff with ssh, etc... I continue to be horrified at the refusal of modern app developers to write code to help them write code.

Someone already did that for us, it's called an IDE. I continue to be horrified by engineering re-write code that already exists.

An IDE is not a build tool.

I use Maven for all my Android builds.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#76

Post by cageface »

ajross wrote: post #58
ozchrisb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone already did that for us, it's called an IDE. I continue to be horrified by engineering re-write code that already exists.

Except it clearly doesn't. For the use case in question, an IDE can build a .apk and install it on a single connected device. Can you run it in the same step? What if the app has a 10MB data set and takes 8 seconds to install, can you optimize that by copying only the binary? Can you wipe the data from the host machine? How about install a known data set for a test? Install on 5 devices and run a test suite without m…

How good is code completion in VIM for Android apps? I was an emacs guy for many years but since I started doing iOS I can't imagine writing Objective-C without really solid code completion. Maybe it's less necessary in Android?

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#77

Post by brimpa »

palebluedot wrote: post #44
danielpal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes command-line build/deploy is horrible, the way to use vim is: - Write code in VIM - Build everything on Eclipse. Basically keep eclipse open only to build, and deploy to the smartphone. Everything else, do it in vim.

I do all my Android dev in VIM, and I use ant on the command line for building... what do you find horrible about the command line build? I just use 'ant debug' for debug builds, and 'ant release' for release builds - and 'adb install -r' to install the package once it is built. Usually, it ends up being a couple of up arrows, and enter, on the command line to build / deploy.

I wrote a script to automate these steps as well as taking a few options to allow me to:

- adb clean (because chasing syntax errors that don't exist is a headache)

- run my (shockingly limited) test suite

- copy the .apk to a shared Dropbox directory that I use to let a few people help me test nightly builds

Without the tests the full build takes a few seconds (on MBP from March 2011).

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#78

Post by Bodil »

l0st3d wrote: post #73
angryasian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are people complaining about eclipse because it starts up slow ? After initial startup, what are the issues that cause this person to be scared of using an IDE ?

Eclipse is frankly a poor text editor. After learning enough Emacs to get comfortable, it becomes clear that there is a better way. For example, undo. In Eclipse, type something, undo it and type something else. Now you can't use the undo/redo function to get the first thing that you typed back. In Emacs, you can, since undo is an undoable operation. Similarly, having things like i-search, align-regex and rectangle e…

In all fairness, Eclipse does have i-search, and on Ctrl-J it's not that difficult to discover.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#79

Post by Mavrik »

cageface wrote: post #76
ajross wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it clearly doesn't. For the use case in question, an IDE can build a .apk and install it on a single connected device. Can you run it in the same step? What if the app has a 10MB data set and takes 8 seconds to install, can you optimize that by copying only the binary? Can you wipe the data from the host machine? How about install a known data set for a test? Install on 5 devices and run a test suite without m…

How good is code completion in VIM for Android apps? I was an emacs guy for many years but since I started doing iOS I can't imagine writing Objective-C without really solid code completion. Maybe it's less necessary in Android?

Because you're writing Java, which is a very verbose language, all code completion and code generation (method stubs, auto constructors etc.) are a godsend when working with Android.

That's why I'm always wondering why anyone would so much want to waste time with typing Java on VIM (even though I DO use Vim for other programming tasks) instead of just using an IDE specifically customized to make such development faster and easier.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#80

Post by scotth »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #63
danielpal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes command-line build/deploy is horrible, the way to use vim is: - Write code in VIM - Build everything on Eclipse. Basically keep eclipse open only to build, and deploy to the smartphone. Everything else, do it in vim.

Funny, that's exactly what I do. Eclipse for building and debugging; Vim for coding. It's a pretty happy combination especially considering that the switch between perspectives is, for me, much more disorienting than the switching between two applications [I feel lame saying this, but the perspective change is really disorienting for me...].

I think that you have to work to make your perspectives as similar as possible. Nominate screen regions for areas of similar importance.
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