Re:Visual Studio 2013
by thom on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @01:26PM
(#6763234)
I use clojure inside emacs fulltime now, but in a former life I worked with and liked Visual Studio, and I even owned Visual C++ 1.0 back in the day.
Visual Studio keybindings (even its emacs keybindings, whether or not they existing in 2013) are indeed pretty bad in places - as you note, it sometimes makes a distinction between the text editor and the UI widgets, so you do find yourself leaving home position regularly to move up and down a list, instead of C-n/C-p. But a lot of the problem is just people not bothering to learn what's available.
The IntelliSense has better defaults than you get with most emacs modes, which is possibly why people notice a difference (i.e. in VS you don't have to _do_ anything, it auto suggests, and completes on punctuation, and always pops up a lot of nice info, all out of the box). But I'm not sure there's anything there you can't achieve in emacs, depending on your language - certainly in Java with flymake and the eclipse compiler you can do some good stuff.
The huge gulf, for me, is with refactoring. Visual Studio with Resharper is vastly, vastly more intelligent, powerful and reliable than anything you've likely cooked up in emacs, even with semantic mode etc. And I think this unlocks a lot of productivity - sometimes a problem isn't just text, it's deeply tied to the semantics of your code, and in VS (again, I'm assuming nobody uses it without Resharper) you can be performing refactorings at a pretty high level without skipping a beat. In emacs, not so much. The degree to which that happens in your code is the degree to which you'll notice and become bothered by it.
Again, this is for OO languages. I would certainly like more refactoring power than I have with clojure today, but nothing that's so far above and beyond just day-to-day paredit that I've bothered.
Visual Studio keybindings (even its emacs keybindings, whether or not they existing in 2013) are indeed pretty bad in places - as you note, it sometimes makes a distinction between the text editor and the UI widgets, so you do find yourself leaving home position regularly to move up and down a list, instead of C-n/C-p. But a lot of the problem is just people not bothering to learn what's available.
The IntelliSense has better defaults than you get with most emacs modes, which is possibly why people notice a difference (i.e. in VS you don't have to _do_ anything, it auto suggests, and completes on punctuation, and always pops up a lot of nice info, all out of the box). But I'm not sure there's anything there you can't achieve in emacs, depending on your language - certainly in Java with flymake and the eclipse compiler you can do some good stuff.
The huge gulf, for me, is with refactoring. Visual Studio with Resharper is vastly, vastly more intelligent, powerful and reliable than anything you've likely cooked up in emacs, even with semantic mode etc. And I think this unlocks a lot of productivity - sometimes a problem isn't just text, it's deeply tied to the semantics of your code, and in VS (again, I'm assuming nobody uses it without Resharper) you can be performing refactorings at a pretty high level without skipping a beat. In emacs, not so much. The degree to which that happens in your code is the degree to which you'll notice and become bothered by it.
Again, this is for OO languages. I would certainly like more refactoring power than I have with clojure today, but nothing that's so far above and beyond just day-to-day paredit that I've bothered.