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Commanding your text editor

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Re: Commanding your text editor

#51

Post by cocoflunchy »

A few missing things from Sublime users:

Ctrl/Cmd + P is even better than fuzzy search in Sublime; it searches in all the files that are contained in opened folders.

Automatic indentation is also available without plugin, though you have to add a key binding:

  { "keys":  ["ctrl+shift+r"], "command": "reindent" , "args": {"single_line": false} }
or look for it in Edit > Line > Reindent.

Completion works with Tab too on Sublime.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#52

Post by Derbasti »

octopus wrote: post #48
Derbasti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you're not coding C#. Then it ranges from somewhat usable to utter lunacy.

Have you tried VS2012 ? Give it a try for C++ and you will see that the autocomplete works great.

I did try it. It is certainly better than before. That is, it's usable now. Nowhere near Eclipse/Java, XCode/Ocj-C or VS/C#, though.

Usually, I tend to ignore it more often than I actually find it useful. Even some simplistic look-for-common-words-in-open-buffers in regular text editors works better in my experience.

That said, add Visual Assist X and it's a different ball game.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#53

Post by johncoltrane »

robbles wrote: post #43
johncoltrane wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this explanation makes more sense than your original comment. I agree with you on everything. These days, the number of new Vim users who switched because of some misinformed and/or shiny blog post is staggering. People now seem to just jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week. I wonder what would happen if nobody was there to tell them what t…

I'm not sure that there is a large group of developers that "jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week" actually. I think there are enough developers around these days that when they occasionally try out new tools or technologies and blog about it, it creates the impression that everyone is switching all the time. It's hard to measure this, of course.…

This group of people is mostly a construction of my brain as a result of its exposition to reddit/hn's stuff. I have no numbers to back it up.

There's probably a silent majority, everywhere around us, who act as adults but that vocal minority… boy how loud is it!

Re: Commanding your text editor

#54

Post by Derbasti »

jarel wrote: post #25
kayoone wrote: post #22

As long as my programmer idols Carmack and Persson use Visual Studio and Eclipse respectively to produce amazing stuff, i dont really care about changing to vim/emacs...besides i work mostly in statically typed languages anyway, so i would miss alot of the IDE features for refactoring.

For me the post boils down to "learn how to do these six things when editing code". Which is good advice to IDE users as well. Okay, indentation and auto-completion are rather trivial things to do in an IDE, but most IDEs come with powerful search tools and for most IDEs I don't know how to use them.

Indentation by itself can be tricky, too. Is your code correctly indented when you copy and paste it somewhere? Can it correctly re-indent code that got mangled for some reason? How well does indentation cope with non-standard language extensions (think Qt or C++ macros)? So I would not call that trivial.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#56

Post by Derbasti »

jheriko wrote: post #12

I think its much more important to become good at using whatever text editor is infront of you - i.e. learning the standard Windows/Mac shortcuts, instead of becoming reliant on what I consider the 'old' style of text editor. Yet to meet anyone using vim or emacs who is actually more productive than me... the more productive people use Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse or whatever else is infront of them. Maybe I am wron…

My idea is: Use whatever makes you happy. A happy person is sure to be more productive than an unhappy one. If you like IDEs, use those. If you like old fashioned text editors, use those. If you like new fangled text editors, use those.

Just always keep an eye out how you can improve yourself and your tools. There are many hidden joys to be found in all those programs, methodologies and workflows. Don't fall into the trap that just because you committed to one thing, you can't try another. There is nothing worse than being limited by your tools and not even noticing it.

Even if you don't stick with the new stuff in the long run, you will probably still learn something valuable. Learning a new tool or language or methodology is like visiting a foreign country. It is not so much about seeing new stuff, but more about gaining new insight in your own ways and getting a new appreciation and context for what you take for granted.

Be happy and keep an open mind is all I'm saying.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#58

Post by [deleted] »

sejje wrote: post #35
kayoone wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me. That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to che…

Vim doesn't make me feel like John Carmack. It just keeps me sane. It just saves me from "arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace." Editing python it's fine. If I was going to write c++, I'm sure I'd pick up an ide. With a plugin for vim keybindings.

[deleted]

Re: Commanding your text editor

#59

Post by aerique »

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #42
martinced wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editor war! You are confusing non-expressive languages like C# and Java which needs lots of "refactoring" and lots of boilerplate code (hence the need for code generators which understand "patterns" and refactoring tools etc.) with "productive languages", for a start. Then your point is moot anyway: since quite some time there are vim programmers using an Eclipse bridge and getting the Eclipse features right from ins…

> non-expressive languages like C# C# is a quite expressive language in my opinion. And i'm quite versed in Clojure, which seems to be your language of predilection. It does have limited type inference and lambdas, which makes it a lot less painful than Java. It really depends on the problem you have at hand anyway. But even if you have a problem where you need a more functional approach, with immutable data structur…

I can really recommend Evil mode for Vim goodness in Emacs!

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Re: Commanding your text editor

#60

Post by aerique »

emillon wrote: post #4
eitland wrote: post #3

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source. vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

Autocompletion does not have to be context-aware to be useful. "Dumb" completion of words in the current buffer, or filename, is quite useful IMHO.

Dumb autocompletion easily covers 50% of my cases and with Emacs hippie-expand (or one of its modern siblings) up to 75%: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/HippieExpand

That said, Emacs and Vim also have intelligent autocompletion depending on the language and support for it has only been getting better.

disclaimer: numbers have been made up

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