About the difference between IDEs and programmable programmers'
editors: my problems with the former are that
(a) they almost always neglect their editor component (lots of
features, if you're lucky; but what good is that if everyday
editing tasks are a pain, require non-mnemonic, hand-wrecking
key combos, or even use of menus/mouse; not to mention that
some everyday editing features are not even supported, or that
extensibility and configuration tend to be on the backseat);
it is hard to write a good programmers' editor, but it is a lot
harder to emulate decades of experience with evolving the
editor and user/script community around such a good editor;
(b) they overemphasize GUIs (*) over usability; I don't want a
demonstration of GUI widgets, I have work to do - so I need
unobtrusive support at my fingertips, not distractions that
invite me to explore the GUI when I need to explore the code;
both my own visual bandwidth and my screen are limited,
can't waste much of it;
I would very much like to use the advanced functionalities that
some IDEs provide, but without their ballast, and without giving
up the Vim features I use all the time.
All that is needed is a headless version of the IDE (non-GUI server
exposing the IDE functionality), which can be controlled via some
API (commandline would be easiest to integrate, but others can
be made to work). Actually, headless versions of browsers would
be useful for the same purposes: reuse Safari's syntax checks and
errors, Firefox/Firebug's commandline completion, Opera's debugger,
Internet Exploders Javascript engine for testing, etc (rearrange as
needed;-) - do any browsers support such headless mode?
One complex example is eclim, which allows to access headless
Eclipse servers from Vim: http://eclim.org/
For the languages suppported, you get Eclipse-based completion,
refactoring, etc, right from your Vim session. Unfortunately, there
is very little Javascript functionality exposed so far, but the framework
is there (as in, both the editor integration and the Eclipse
functionality are there, someone would need to connect the two,
as has been done for the other languages).
Claus
(*) GUI: gratuituous user-in-the-face (sometimes)
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