11–20 of 71 posts
> What are the features of your IDE that you think separate it from the rest? What can you not live with out.
Extensibility. I can live without any other built-in features, because I can always write them myself in short order. Imagine a programming language in which you can't write your own functions. You wouldn't want to use that, would you?
Nothing distracts my focus from my core work more than the IDE doing something I didn't intend. This is especially irritating when I accidentally switched modes or put myself somewhere else with no idea what I did or how to undo it.
So I should be able to turn it off and never worry about it again.
The caveman in me loves textpad.
* Syntax hilighting (any text editor can have this) * Find Resource by starting to type the filename * Follow function calls * integrated debugger
I used visual studio a long time ago, now any ide without a debugger seems quaint.
I use NetBeans and NuSphere (PHP IDE) both are OK. The NuSphere PHP/debug plugin is ace. You can pause, edit variables, run random commands, move execution to a different point, all sorts of cool stuff.
Also love the chrome JS debugger, it's a bit verbose for my liking, maybe that's JS having a lot of crap bundled in objects all visible by default.
I really love Sublime, so here are a few features which stop be from switching to apps such as Chocolat. - Multiple Cursors, at first you think this is just a gimmick, but it soon shows its usefulness. I use this feature all of the time. - Jump to definition. - Useful and intuitive key bindings. - Console output.
I'm an Emacs user. I don't have a very long init.el but appreciate being able to deactivate stuff I don't use, especially things like scrollbars, toolbars, etc.
Using IDEs I feel overwhelmed (too many GUI elements) and powerless (mostly because I'm not familiar with them, but discoverability is important too, see Emacs' apropos.)
I use vi(m) because it's available everywhere. I have no particular opinion on whether it's otherwise better than anything else, and I kind of suck at using it.
I use vi(m) because it's available everywhere. I have no particular opinion on whether it's otherwise better than anything else, and I kind of suck at using it.
WEll you could check out "Practical Vim" i found it tremendously helpful
Seriously guys, if I wanted to continuously switch between my editor and a browser with API docs, I'd be using a text-editor. If I wanted to spend 80% of my time going through badly commented undocumented source code written by colleagues or outright (friendly, OSS-contributing) strangers, I'd join a Ruby shop. I want an IDE with discoverability, and a language that supports this well.
My other must-have feature is integrated debugging. An IDE without integrated debugging isn't and IDE, it's a text editor with some plugins.