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Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

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Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#31

Well, mine is Emacs. > 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?

"infinite wishes"

Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#32
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "learn to use vim properly" has been on my TODO list for about 15 years now. It's probably time I did something about it.

This Vim game helped me more than anything I'd seen in ~5 years: http://vim-adventures.com

It's pretty outstanding, but I'm kind of baffled by the pricing (6 months for $25). As already a vim expert, I clicked the pay link expecting to happily drop a one-time ~$10 and balked. Just going through the demo is likely to be worthwhile, though.

Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#36
One feature I've been loving in vi lately is the ability to easily drop source locations into my quickfix list to step through. Not sure I "can not live with out" that, though. Modal editing is probably the most important feature to me, followed closely by shell integration.

Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#37

Smart and fast definition and reference lookups. That's all I really need but it's surprising how many IDEs are broken in this aspect.

Yeah those are definitely my favorite features, something that I think Intellij gets really right but most others don't. But my can't live without feature is Visual debugging. It reduces cognitive overhead to such a degree that it's the IDE killer feature for me.

Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#39
Must have:

- An editor that can show different line-endings (cr/lf) and it must be possible to between them (nice to have - switching that independently for each open file).

- Text search per file, per project and per solution.

Nice to have:

- Correct syntax highlighting

- Find definitions/declarations in c++ code correctly

- Free software

- Cross platform support

- Support for different compilers

- Show potential compile errors already on typing (in VS since 2010 I think, that feature alone made me use VS again more regularly)

- Debugger with the features of VS (fast, most useful data shown automatically or with mouse-over, easy to edit values, easy to copy&paste parameters + values + stack, easy to add watches with right-click, remembers breakpoints&watches&active windows between debug sessions, comfortable conditional breakpoints and watches)

- Nice support for disassembler (stuff like showing c++ and it's asm code mixed)

- Locking window layouts (missing that in VS where I mess up my layout by dragging windows accidentally all the time)

- Configuration files that don't cause troubles when working in teams (troubles I've seen with IDE's in the past had been user-specific settings being in project-files and path-settings not written in a OS independent way so each time someone checked in from another all paths got changed again)

- Allow putting project files in any place independent of where the sources are (seen that one several times - IDE's that insisted of placing their project files in the root of the project)

- Plugin-support

Re: Ask HN: What is the must have feature of your IDE

#40
post #24

Discoverability. I want to be able to download a library (through whatever means), and then figure out how to use it from within my code. I want to be able to type the name of a class, object, namespace, whatever the language has for that, that corresponds to the name of said library and then just play with it. I want docs for every method and class (or function, object, whatever) that I enter, in a tooltip, at my fi…

Oh gosh, I agree so very very much. Sadly, for the dynamic languages I program in most, few IDEs handle this correctly. Komodo is the closest, and even it chokes on some more advanced stuff (like IoC containers and the like, though i can get around it with annotations in the comments). Edit: oh by the way, SublimeCodeIntel? It's a port of Komodo's CodeIntel library. I switched to Sublime entirely for a while, but bit…

Have you tried Intellij's dynamic language IDE's? they are pretty awesome and imo much better than Komodo. Javescript/Python/ruby are all supported out of the box and there are plugins for a ton of other languages.
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