No love for MultiEdit? :(
I’m also was wondering that it wasn’t mentioned. At some point I did all programming in it, compiling via command line, switching to Borland IDEs only for debugging….
IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
441–450 of 607 posts
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vim was born in Amiga and Amiga OS came with some Emacs clone.
I surely don't remember such clone. As for where Vim was born, hardly matters, it was someone with UNIX culture background, that happened to own an Amiga.
Amiga OS 3.1 has it under the Workbench floppy sets. You get it by default.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#443ha, he even lists RHIDE!! :-D
The only free solution back then in which you could have a free 32bit protected mode DPMI built-in. And a VESA linear frame buffer!!!
Good ol days :-D
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magit is really great, however, it can definitely be quite slow and buggy sometimes
I've been using Magit for years, and have never noticed any bugs. The interface is unique and takes a lot of getting used to. I did need to leverage my extensive experience with Git and Emacs to understand unexpected behaviour but the fault always lay with me. Given the implications of bugs in such a critical part of a developer's workflow, can you be more specific?
Mainly random lisp errors being thrown in certain cases, likely just unimplemented functionality, I didn't record them since there are so many. I probably see one every other day but usually it's somewhat outside of the normal operation of magit. It still feels like a bug though, and very likely is.
I mean, magit is not some perfect piece of software. Of course it has bugs, I just hit them quite a lot. The slowness is more annoying though. Sometimes it takes seconds to open magit after hitting C-x g
I've also had magit get stuck in a 100% CPU usage loop a couple times
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#445The amazing thing about Turbo Pascal was that my memory was better, my focus was better, I could stay up much longer and my right knee didn’t hurt.
Edit: I think there is a lot of “do it because we can do it not because we benefit from it” in modern software. But fetishizing the past gets a bit silly. I do still remember getting plenty of useless documentation in old TP. And blasting through an interface that lags behind your typing is how you end up doing something completely unpredictable because one keystroke was a bit off.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vim was born in Amiga and Amiga OS came with some Emacs clone.
I surely don't remember such clone. As for where Vim was born, hardly matters, it was someone with UNIX culture background, that happened to own an Amiga.
> I surely don't remember such clone.
I think they mean MicroEmacs. Despite its name, it was not Emacs, but it had Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts, multiple buffers, and macros, which was quite neat for a free 1986 application on a home computer.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How did the magit guy or people even come up with the data model? It's not all that different from a typical TUI interface. Magit isn't great because of the interface. It's great because the alternative (plain git) has such a crappy interface. Contrast principle and all.
Magit is pretty great because of transient, the model of showing what all the commands are. It's a very natural and easy UI affordance
Transient was factored out much later. It's not just transient that makes magit great, though. It's the only alternative porcelain for git that I'm aware of and one that makes git both easier to use and understand. I'm the "git guy" at every place I've worked but I owe it all to magit. Other git frontends just do the CLI stuff with point and click, they don't help you understand what's going on at all.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#448I think Emacs still does all of this; the argument the author makes is that it is "arcane", it just uses conventions he is not used to. It is however fully self-documented and interactive. For me the best textual interface I've ever used remains Magit in Emacs: https://magit.vc/ I wish more of Emacs was like it. I actually use emacs as my git clients even when I'm using a different IDE for whatever reason.
It's not about being arcane, it's about the lack of discoverability. Emacs and vi don't have (by default) affordances like a menu that enables a user to discover and learn the interface at their own pace. The learning curve is much smoother and allows for casual uses without having to pull a book each time.
Emacs does have a menu by default. It's one of the things I appreciate most about it (especially the Help menu) and I'm always befuddled to see frameworks like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs disable the menubar.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#449The Think Pascal IDE was on another level for it's time.
Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
#450Things like Borland C and VB/WinForms really do take me to a simpler time. There was joy in being able to write simple programs very fast, in a more intuitive way, without needing to use browsers or frameworks or writing shaders to do the simplest things. Current systems are more powerful and versatile for sure, but for a teenager curious for coding they are a much less welcoming environment in a lot of ways. The ever growing amount of technologies you need to learn now does not help either.