On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 13:20 -0700, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > Depends on what you're trying to do. > > The problem with many IDEs is that they forget the primary purpose is > to write code, and they provide an absolutely sucky editor, and a ton > of crap to "help"... forgetting that the editor is the _key_ tool in > the programmer's toolbox. > > Another problem is that IDEs seem to expect you to bring all of your > development into _their_ environment; I have an environment I like, > thank you very much, I don't need your lame-ass version.
Which is why I like the ones that are extensible. > > I've never used Understand. It was installed on a machine I used once, > but it didn't seem all that useful, probably because I had no > documentation for it, and didn't have the time to futz with it. I don't know when you used it last, but it's improved a lot since I first bought it in 1999. I use it like an IDE for C code (even though I have a perfectly good IDE from Sun, I am used to Understand and have not had the time yet to learn the Sun IDE). > > I discovered that Eclipse has a "decent" vi editor plugin, so I gave it > a try. Having a decent (even if crippled) editor in Eclipse (and a > faster machine) made it possible for me to give it another try. I found > some things nice, but I was a bit annoyed at the complexity Eclipse > brings to the table. Eclipse won't even run on my system, so I haven't even tried it. I've wanted to, other engineers here like it. If it won't run, it's useless to me. > > So I tried netbeans, as it has the "jvi" plugin... and it's been blowing > the doors of Eclipse, so far as providing a usable and pleasant > development environment. > > I spent a week on getting Eclipse set up in order to do reasonable > development... and I was having a WTF? moment a half-dozen times per > day. I lost half-days to starting over in order to correct some little > gotcha I missed before. > > I got to an equivalent level of functionality in NetBeans in a *day*. > Then I installed the profiler and played with it. Then the debugger. > > I just don't think NetBeans will do C or C++. So it's a little off-topic. > > > ... > > One of the things more useful in GUIs (at least, I haven't found a CLI > version yet) is refactoring. For Java, I have a very nice tool called > "RefactorIt", with a gazillion refactorings. When I was doing C++, I > went looking for something similiar... and came up dry. The _only_ > useful C++ refactoring tool I found was SlickEdit. You might try the Sun Studio Enterprise IDE. It also has refactoring (I love this feature). It also does more than the NetBeans IDE does as it not only supports NetBeans functionality, but also everything else you'd want to do with Java (it comes with bundled Tomcat and Java Application Server, collaboration, version control, database connectivity, UML modeling which is really nice, etc.) Sun Studio 11 is for C/C++, Fortran, and makefiles and resembles the NetBeans and Sun Studio Enterprise environments. You can configure it to use multiple compilers and version control (like the other Sun IDEs). I'm not sure if it has refactoring capabilities (Why wouldn't it? It resembles the other Sun IDEs so it stands to reason that it would.) since I haven't set up a project with it yet. It's free. I have it installed, but need some time (a day or less) to mess with it. Most of what I do these days has been Java, so I have not needed a C/C++ IDE for any large, extended projects lately. > > For example, the auto-complete stuff in Eclipse and NetBeans seems like > it would be very useful... except that as a touch-typist, it sometimes > tries to auto-complete stuff as I'm typing, and the delay between seeing > when it tries to help and my telling my fingers to stop can lead to me > really screwing up my code. The Sun Enterprise IDE has a configurable completion option. You can configure the time delay before the tooltip pops up, or completely disable it. PGA -- Paul G. Allen BSIT/SE Owner/Sr. Engineer Random Logic Consulting www.randomlogic.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
