If GUI floats your boat, eclipse particularly (and other similar editors) are great tools to be able to program many languages in the same editor. If non-GUI is your thing, emacs or vim are fantastic.
jtgxbass, If you read my posts, you will see I agree with this. If you actually go back to the first post and my response, the question is whether it is a good idea (obviously in the general sense) for someone to center their development around one editor, and Emacs in specific as the Pragmatic Programmer authors do. My summarized response is, that for most people, this does not make sense primarily because so much work has gone into specialized editors that really fit a *given language* like a glove. Moreover, Most people have decided that they like GUI and don't like command line only. But even if you don't like GUI's, by using Emacs, in Java, for example, you give up lots of invaluable language specific help. These are really two *separate* points. As I have stated before, if you don't like GUIs, Emacs (or similar) is a totally appropriate tool. It is even appropriate for many specialized tasks and for circumstances (like a terminal window) where a GUI is not possible. But evangelizing Emacs as a mainstream tool for all programming editing (as the Pragmatic Programmer folks do) just doesn't make sense for most people. Beyond the benefits of language specific editors, most folks have long since voted with their dollars and their usage patterns that GUI is much more comfortable than command line. It is so obvious it almost seems silly to say it (though the initial question asked in this thread proves otherwise). This is not Coke vs Pepsi, its orange juice vs castor oil. Even if you argue that castor oil is be better for you, most folks just cant get it down. That said, there is nothing wrong with preferring the command line. And if you love Emacs, or love LISP, or just don't like mice, or don't have enough memory for Eclipse or whatever, nothing wrong with Emacs. But don't position it as a mainstream option appropriate for most programmers for the bulk of their work in 2007. Most programmers find the option unpalatable. It seems odd to me that there is any argument about the fact that command line editing is not mainstream. But as Nicolas correctly stated, people do love their editing tools. I guess no one wants to feel they are on an island, and everyone wants to feel that their solution can be and should be used by others. But it is probably beyond any reasonable expectation to suggest to the average GUI editor user to switch to a command line editor. chill
I am quite chill, thank you very much. Regards Hank
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