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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

#43
Since I started to use Vim, I can't switch to any other editor or IDE. It's not because Vim editor is so great or because I don't like those niceties that other editors and IDEs offer, but it's because I have those Vim-bindings in my muscle memory and I can't be productive w/o them.

Show me an IDE that has nice support for Vim-bindings and is highly customizable (plugin support with rich API, programming language I can use to improve it as I like it), and I will happily leave Vim and use it. So far the closest thing I've seen is Lighttable, but still it lacks some Vim-bindings and is very in beta for now.

To answer OP's question, Vim-bindings and configuration options at extreme.

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

#45
post #15

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.

Would definitely add the "extremely simple" package manager to the list.

True say.

Package Control should be built in and I'm surprised negotiations haven't been made yet.

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

#47

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…

I find Intellij Idea with decompiler great for this. It searches/downloads source code from internet if exists. Otherwise it decompiles binaries.

You can debug/fix code in libraries without even realizing it.

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

#49

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…

Two environments I play with offer this. One is the slime package for Emacs (I use it with either ClozureCL or SBCL.) Commercial CL IDEs have the same features. The other one is Pharo.

In both case, it's a dynamic language, with an image-based implementation.

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

#50
Pros: Vi's ability to be easily mouseless, and it's wonderful "editing language". By "editing language" I mean that editing commands follow a syntax with verbs, objects, modifiers, etc. The "dw" command, for instance, deletes a word. Then you learn that "p" is a paragraph object. Can you "dp" to delete a paragraph? Of course, because that's how it goes in vi/vim. Want to delete 4 words? 4dw. Want to change a word? cw deletes and then puts you in insert mode. Does that work on paragraphs and other things? Of course. Learning new things in vim is kind of like compound interest in terms of payoff. Every text object you learn gets multiplied by all the verbs you know, and any new verb can be applied to all the text objects you know.

Cons: vimscript

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