On 09/26/2018 08:23 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
On 09/05/2018 01:34 PM, ShadoLight wrote:

I sometimes wonder if the Vim/Emacs 'affectionados' spend so much time mastering their editors (which by all accounts have a steep learning curve), that they forgot that IDE development did not stagnate after they left!

I sometimes wonder similar things about Vim/Emacs users, too ;)

A lot of people use Vim/Emacs plus a full IDE.

I use IntelliJ for work. I also use Vim. Vim is much better when I know my APIs, and it's exceptional at applying transformations to a block of text. IntelliJ is much better when I'm using an API I'm unfamiliar with. Sometimes I'll switch back and forth editing the same file -- I'll hack something together in Vim and then use IntelliJ to quickly find and fix errors.

For D, unfortunately, I haven't gotten an IDE to work yet. Not with any appreciable degree of autocomplete. So I stick with Vim pretty much entirely.

But don't forget, not all non-IDE people are Vim/Emacs. And just like IDE development, plain-editor development didn't stagnate either. Many non-IDE users (like me) use editors that are far more contemporary than Vim/Emacs and *don't* have that learning curve.

Pretty much all advanced features in a text editor have a learning curve. Kind of unavoidable; we're asking text editors to do complex things. GUI editors can offer *less* of a learning curve, and they can offer advice better, but they can't eliminate it entirely.

And for that matter, sometimes I get the impression that IDE users think non-IDE editors are far less capable than they really are. For the most part, "IDE" mostly just means: editor + GUI-based buildsystem + debugger.

Autocomplete, highlighting errors, semantic code navigation, and displaying extra semantic information are other IDE features that text editors tend to lack.

On the other hand, I've seen projects billing themselves as IDEs when they were pretty much just a tree view for files in the project, a GtkSourceView, and a build button.

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