On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Casey McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ted Roche wrote: >> Netbeans is kind of heavy just for text editing, but it is a snappy >> IDE on strong enough machines. > > Heavy is a nice way of putting it. :-) I definitely have love/not-love > relationship with it. >
Yeah. Outside of the FoxPro environment, there's a range of opinions that goes far, wide and deep on a couple of axes about the "right" way of doing software development, and it's been a real eye-opener for me. (This is a bit of a tangent from the original question, where I'm searching for an _editor_.) On one end, there are the heavy IDEs, battleships of capabilities, like Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, Komodo, that include editors, debuggers, integrated help, add-on tools, data browsers, kitchen sinks and Eliza. The heaviest of the heavy include WYSIWYG editors that embed IE or Mozilla or another engine and let you see the rendered page and perhaps edit in that environment. At the opposite end, there are stripped-down editors that... edit. Kate, Gedit, gvim, nano, pico. etc. Those, too, have a slippery slope, with some as simple as Notepad, and others having built in scripting in Lua or Lisp. SciTE is a favorite of mine, using the same rich editor (Scintilla) as the Dabo environment, with Lua scripting and the ability to run scripts and capture their output, but without the full debugging interface. There are editors that edit and... support macros, allow shell access, capture console output,... and creep right up in features to the Big Boys above. Along a somewhat different axis, tools like vim and emacs are rich programming environments in their own right, but can do a lot of what they do in a console or simple GUI environment. I read a blog posting a few months ago that hit me like a V8: the thesis, roughly restated was: novices' learning is harmed by big IDEs; they should start with a stripped down editor, a console and a browser. Learn the engines without all of the add-ons, the "helpful" balloons that just offer options you don't understand, the wysiwyg that gets in the way of understanding what's really happening under the hood. The idea struck a chord with me. A problem I've seen with a lot of the big IDEs is that you can spend more time managing the components and their conflicts than actually getting work done. If you're supporting plugins for a couple of languages, for your source-code control system, for ftp access to your server, for your preferred AJAX library, you can spend more time updating the modules and resolving conflicts than you do _using_ the darn thing. A colleague ran into this problem with phpEd; I got stuck in Compatibility Heck with RadRails. And don't even get me started with the originators of DLL Hell.... So, for this particular job, I need an editor. +1 for color-coding HTML, having some smart search/replace characteristics. Tag matching is a big +1 (where's the </p> that matches this <p>?). Smart indenting, undenting, configuring tabs to insert and remove as spaces. We don't need a design tool, as we've already got hand-crafted CSS and a basic HTML template; we just need to shoehorn content into it with a few variations on the basic theme, so "designer" tools like Expression, which I've heard some surprisingly good things about, are probably too feature-filled. Not to mention closed-source. Thanks, all, for the suggestions. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
