Wednesday, September 20. 2006Play the field, see what IDEs are out there
As someone who devleops software for a living, you will spend somwhere between 5 and 15% of the best years of your life, staring into an IDE. Thats a pretty significant amount of time no matter what way you look at it. Probably more than you'll be able to spend on your hobbies, possibly more than you'll get to spend with your friends, boyfriends or girlfriends. When you hit your mid twenties and take up soccer, you run and buy all the best gear (the stuff you wished you had when you were young and fit). When you finally get a car you realise its pretty important that you actually like the car, cause you're gonna spend a lot of time sitting in it. But for some reason a lot of people seem to happily code away using weak tools, that look horrible, and they don't see a problem with this. Types of IDEs
The Trophy WifeThis type of IDE looks really great, people even remark about how good it looks when they visit your desk. What those people don't see is the fights you have with it, to get it to do anything in a reasonable manner. They're back at their own desk happily working away fantasising about what it'd be like to spend a day or two coding with yours. Ready willing and ableIf you can bare to look at them, these are extremely powerful IDEs. The owners will boast about 7 key shortcuts, and how in just 24 keystrokes you can built a ticketing system into the editor. Everyone else looks at these and thinks "looking like that, it'd want to be pretty useful for coding, otherwise no one would touch it". The happy middle groundJust like partners, this is the one that everyone thinks they have. No one ever admits that their IDE is disgusting looking, or useless bubbles and scratched metal, cause to them it's perfect. But seriouslyHere are my definitive requirements for an IDE...
The picturesThe IDE Gallery holds the pictures of some of the regular readers here, if you'd like to add yours, just mail it to me. 
Scribes on Linux 
jEdit on Linux 
nano. I think we all code far more in nano than we really should. 
jEdit on OSX. Note the difference in text rendering, and all the shine 
vim-gtk using the Ion windows manager. 
gVim on Gnome, different color scheme 
TextMate on OSX. Monaco, the font used here, is quite a good programming font 
Notepad on Windows XP. This isn't a joke, I know one very productive programmer who uses Notepad full time. 
Eclipse on Linux. Prepare to wear away your alt and tab keys. 
Visual Studio 2005. A well respected IDE, but like Eclipse, you really want 2 monitors, or one fucking big one. 
MonoDevelop on Linux Update: The ones below here have been mailed to me after this post went live
No IDE! German Gutierrez uses the above to code bash scripts 
emacs finally makes an appearance (with ecb), thanks to Phil Gregory. Notice anything odd about this screenshot? [Click it to view full size]
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Ya, eclipse is far too enterprise oriented. I would prop not use it unless I had a project type deal going on. If it was just one file, vim all the way, if I had to deal with a one off thing with multiple src files, kate all the way.
Too be fair they don't really push eclipse as an IDE any more, its a Rich Client Platform. So in theory its all things to all men, like emacs, being an IDE is just an hang up from the old day.
The black gvim is my screenshot, this is vim-gtk and not Gnome. The window-manager is ion3.
At my new work I started off with Eclipse/CDT in a Gnome desktop, but found my productivity dropped and went back to ion and gvim.
Sorry for that Baruch, I've changed the post accordingly. I find it interesting that you noticed a drop in productivity, things like that tend to creep up on me, until one day I realise "Why the hell am I using this".
It wasn't hard to notice the drop. I coded some C++ and whenever I typed the dot (.) for class access, Intellisense would kick in and make me wait for a few seconds, by which time my train of thought was in the next line. This was on a dual-core machine with 2Gb memory, not a bad machine at all.
gvim on the other hand just works, takes much less memory and when it does kick the intellisense to work it continues to show the characters typed. I'm not very fond of Intellisense at all, usually I know what method I want and will type it much faster than intellisense. The continuous build of Eclipse was nice, but I used dnotify to do that for me, even though it's less integrated than Eclipse. The integrated debugger is the best part of an IDE, I'm using ddd for debugging and while it's not too bad, it's also not on the same level of convenience as an integrated debugger.
Masklinn,
I didn't forget it, no one has emailed me a screenshot yet... Des
VS2005 is my ide in work. It does work well for large c# projects. The intellisense is fantastic, and has really eased the learning curve (!) of c# for me. I wouldn't use it for anything else though. Its quite slow. I need to have 4 copies of it open, and this means my machine will take 5 minutes to shut down. It sometimes hangs when opening files. Its build system is not the greatest, it tries to figure out dependencies, but doesn't always rebuild everything properly.
For anything other than c#, On windows I use texpad, on *nix Kate is excellent. Both are lightning fast, ideal for working with large amounts of files. Their file selection mechanism is far superior to vs2005.
A nice little synopsis there Des!
One thing I notice is that you don't seem to come to any conclusions .... what IS the best IDE in your opinion? BTW, the OS X jEdit is mine and I'm a big fan of jEdit. My requirements are slightly different to yours because I like to build stuff from the command line but in general I agree with you. Syntax highlighting and braket matching are vital to me as is controlable auto-indentation. I want the power of auto indentation but I want control over the style! Because jEdit is plugin-based I now have it set up to do everything I want and IDE to do and I've stopped it doing the things I hate IDEs doing so I find it very very productive. And, at the end of the day I think productivity is the real measure of an IDE. Bart.
I don't think its possible to reach a justifiable conclusion in topics like this. I can't realistically compare something like jEdit (which I use) with something like Visual Studio 2005 (which I don't). They are geared for different tasks for different things.
I guess I find I am most productive in Scribes (my one), but having learned all the shortcuts, I am pretty quick in nano too. I genuinely don't like emacs, or vi, and it's not cause I'm too cynical or I "don't get it", I've given them a shot, and they don't work. jEdit is excellent when I am working on a large-ish code base, mainly due to the plugins, but I do genuinely find it slow, in comparison with anything. Textmate on OSX looks like something I would use (if they didn't charge). Sometimes the need to have a strong conclusion can cripple what you want to write about. For example, one of Joel Spolskys best posts was titled Camels and Rubber Duckies, which was a long discussion on pricing without reaching any conclusion at all. In this post I just wanted to point out how wildly different my programming friends are, when they sit down in front of a computer. What that means, isn't really for me to say. It is interesting though 
Cool ... I did really enjoy the post and the pictures. I have to say the difference between jEdit on OS X and jEdit on Linux was shocking .... the font is just so much clearer on OS X and that's pretty imporant for a text editor
TextWrangler is a great IDE for OS X which I would give very serious consideration to were I to be starting from scratch today. It's a stripped-down free version of BBEdit which is meant to be very good (but too expensive for me to try). BTW, I know there is no absolute 'best IDE', however, there is a best one for each of us personally at any given time. ATM, with the work I currently do, jEdit is the best for me. Were what I do to change, my optimal IDE would likely also change. For example, I'm giving very serious consideration to writting proper OS X apps so that will probably mean a switch to XCode for me. When I asked for you choice of IDE I was asking with regard to your personal preference rather than your opinions on an absolute 'best IDE'. I was just curious as to what you use on a day-in-day-out basis, so Scribes and jEdit would appear to be the answer I was looking for
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This website is the online diary of me, Des Traynor, a User Experience Researcher in Dublin, Ireland. I work with Contrast. I usually write on 5 topics: I update about 3-4 times per month. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss this good stuff. If this is your first time here, check out the archives.My official homepage provides more information about who I am, and what I research. You can contact me at destraynor [at] gmail [dot] com Quicksearch |
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