Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative?

Re:Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative? by pmjordan on Sunday October 03, 2010 @08:21AM (#1752593)

I keep meaning to learn how to properly use emacs or vim, but I've never actually found the time to do so[1]. So instead, I've just ended up using a plain multi-document editor with syntax highlighting and sessions - KDE's Kate in my case - and a bunch of terminal windows/tabs for REPLs, compilers, build scripts and version control. Where appropriate, I use a stand-alone debugger for whatever runtime I happen to be programming in (JSwat for the JVM, and KDbg as a gdb frontend).

That said, certain types of work for customers is most easily done in an IDE, for example .NET or Win32 stuff (Visual Studio), iOS programming (XCode) and Nintendo game consoles (CodeWarrior), so I use those where appropriate.

It's probably not an optimal approach and it certainly earns me zero respect from my peers using vim or emacs (or eclipse...). Considering how varied my work tends to be, relying on a cluster of totally independent tools actually works pretty well.

[1] I do use vim for shell scripts and configuration files. iravpPdwq!/?: are the only commands I know, however.

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Re:Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative? by Vivtek on Sunday October 03, 2010 @10:10AM (#1752727)

This is what I've always done, too. Lately, I've been using Padre a lot, which is an open-source programmer's editor written in (and mostly for) Perl and Wx. I know if I really want to, I can change it - so even though I still don't ever change it, it removes the stress of wondering whether I could if I really want to. If you see what I mean.

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