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My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

stevengharms.com

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#51
post #34
post #3

I use NetBeans for development, and always feel like I'm slightly inferior for not relying on vim. There's certainly a lot to be said for it, but I really like (1) being able to zoom straight to the definition of one of my functions (can vim do this?), and (2) being able to code offline / on localhost sometimes. And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a cheapo PC or a tablet to cod…

> I use NetBeans for development Tools are tools, and if you're using a hammer as a hammer it doesn't matter if it's a $12 hammer you got from your local hardware shop or if it's some exotic Estwing thing. (Estwing make nice tools, but their website? Wow. ( http://www.estwingtools.co.uk/index.html ) EDIT: I can't nest ().

I think this might be their site:

http://www.estwing.com/ (looks like there is no co.uk version)

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#52

What is the latency like developing in vim over ssh? I would find the little bit of wait with each key stroke annoying quickly.

Having done this occasionally, it usually wasn't bad at all, but occasionally it got frustrating enough that I'd use a local clone of the repo. It's for that reason that I'm hesitant to go this route (or the iPad/keyboard route).

Interestingly enough, one of the main problems vim was attempting to solve was the annoyance of dealing with a high-latency connection:

http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/people/joy-vi.html

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#53
post #38

I enjoyed his iPad one a bit more. Clearly there is a space here and the Chrome book provides some additional leverage. But it is most interesting to see the 'smart terminal' getting re-invented by this author and others. Which really has me wondering about where those guys are now. Is there an actual "use case" for this as a product? What would a terminal designer do? In many ways the ASUS tablets seem to be good st…

I've been along these lines a bit. Look at it this way: what if, say a pebble sized computer held all the computing state. To actually use it, you would have to keep it near, or pair it somehow, with a keyboard, monitor and (optionally) mouse. Instead of having computers, tablets etc. we would have: a tiny computer, and multiple screens, keyboards, whatever.

Kind of like the ASUS PadFone?

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#55

If your entire development environment consists of a browser then I guess it'll work

Yeah, I don't see how you can do anything other than simple web development this way. For things like mobile, console, Flash, Unity, etc. I'm pretty sure if you're not using the standard IDEs and emulators you're going to have a bad time, and those are difficult to use remotely.

But if you're a web developer, you should by all means do whatever it takes to make development easier.

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#56
post #15
post #3

I use NetBeans for development, and always feel like I'm slightly inferior for not relying on vim. There's certainly a lot to be said for it, but I really like (1) being able to zoom straight to the definition of one of my functions (can vim do this?), and (2) being able to code offline / on localhost sometimes. And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a cheapo PC or a tablet to cod…

Don't feel inferior for not using vim. People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!

Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs.

To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on more than one platform (though not necessarily simply). It has the major features, it's basically feature-complete. For fancier stuff and language-specific tools, you can write plugins with Python, which makes all kinds of things possible. On the other hand, it can get crashy when you use a few plugins - maturity issue. There are few plugins and fewer actively maintained because there's not a big community to support and build on it. A lot of its behavior is reasonable but not really customizable. Random example - if I personally want to have a simpler interface in the vein of scribes or WriteRoom, I'm SOL. Of course, gedit simply cannot be used from a terminal, so you will use another editor for that, with its own keybindings etc.

Most of the good editors have a story like this. Even if it seems to work great and be flexible enough, the community and plugins aren't there.

If your goal is only (say) to write C# for Windows, Visual Studio is probably best. If you only want to write Java, (say) IDEA is probably best. These are powerful environments. But only for certain things, and in a certain way. If you want to code on another platform, different language, really change the behavior, get around a bug, or get a fancy new capability without paying a vendor lots of money, you are just going to hit limits and have to pick up yet another tool.

If you've learned vim or emacs then you at least have a default which licks all these issues at once. In this sense they are "ultimate editors". And this is an opinion informed by broad usage of many editors.

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#57
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use NetBeans for development Tools are tools, and if you're using a hammer as a hammer it doesn't matter if it's a $12 hammer you got from your local hardware shop or if it's some exotic Estwing thing. (Estwing make nice tools, but their website? Wow. ( http://www.estwingtools.co.uk/index.html ) EDIT: I can't nest ().

I think this might be their site: http://www.estwing.com/ (looks like there is no co.uk version)

Yes, thanks for that. It should have been obvious to me that Estwing is American and would be on a dotcom.

Nested brackets meant my link didn't work, but http://www.estwingtools.co.uk/contact_us.html is a valid site by "Map UK" who (I hope) have some distribution agreement for Estwing.

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#58
post #4

"It also costs less than one-tenth of the price of the MBP, so, given that, the hardware performs much better than one-tenth the quality components." Except that it may not. You have the initial cost and then the $25 a month for basically the life of the Chromebook. Not to mention that it becomes rendered useless if you hop on a plane and happen to be on one of the many planes not equipped with wifi. Even if it does…

[deleted]

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#59
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel inferior for not using vim. People who claim that vim/emacs are the ultimate environment typically have a very narrow world-view in my experience. There are absolutely no absolutes!

Rather than just making baseless assertions about people who favor vim or emacs, please mention an IDE with the same maturity, community, cross-platform support, cross-language support, and customizability as either vim or emacs. To pick just one random alternative, let's take gedit. It looks simple and standard, which is nice. It's newer, that could be OK. It can be installed on more than one platform (though not ne…

I'm speaking from personal experience, so no it's not at all baseless. Furthermore, I don't need to satisfy your list of requirements. Those are your requirements.

I want my apps built with the best power-tool that was designed for the target platform. Your list of requirements didn't include that. So, for you maybe something like vim is the "ultimate editor", but for me it doesn't fulfill the primary requirement.

I don't think anyone's a bad person if they really like vim, but it just seems to me that people who think that usually just can't imagine why anyone would not make the same choice as them.

Re: My New Development Laptop: Samsung Chromebook

#60
IMHO Steven only trades the risks. The laptop has no data on it, can't be stolen, great. But doing work, you have a lot of things to work that are not for the public.

But your (linode- or whereever)server, 24 h available and exposed on the net, has a latent risk of being "0wned". And there goes your stuff.

IMHO the risk of your server being 0wned is much greater than losing your notebook (or being stolen), so this model is the unsafer choice.

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