Aww, c'mon. This is always how the wars start!
I stopped using IDEs eons ago. I went from TurboC on
MS-DOS to cc on SCO Xenix. It was a shock. I moved
from C to Perl about 10 years ago, which limited my
options as far as IDE.
I don't even like debuggers now. If you don't understand
enough about what your code should be / is doing based on built
in instrumentation (which you should have put in while
coding) and a few well placed print statements, you really
should not be coding. The only time I break this rule
is when I need to modify someone elses code and I'm not
sure what it is doing. Then I really like DDD for the
debugger.
Gvim
Must haves.
Autoword completion by using ^P and ^N.
This has made a huge difference on my variable and function
naming, since I can use really large descriptive names and only
type them once.
Syntax highlighting. Miss a closing quote and the
rest of the screen goes red.
Paren / brace / bracket bouncing with the % key. I'd kill
for it now if I was forced to lose it.
Columnar cut and paste.
Multiple named buffers.
Ability to edit remote files using scp for read and write.
'.' - dot. do the last command again and again.
Incremental highlighting while you build a search expression.
Ability to jump back and forth between a bunch of files
very quickly. Control^ for the last, number Control^ to grab
a particular one. Split screen isn't a real big draw for
me since I like to see a LARGE amount of text and if I need
more than one file open at a time I'd open another window.
Ability to execute a command and collect the output of
that command for editing, ie
:r !command
External filtering of highlighted text, ie:
Example: Sort / Unique 10 lines by highlighting them
and then typing "!sort -u". Can use this to create
off the cuff Perl filters.
Identical editor in Linux, Unix, and Windows. Always
available, free.
I spent some time in Brief. It was very nice.
I then used Slickedit on Sco Xenix. I went from vi to it,
I loved it. I reimplemented vi style named buffers in it's
macro language and it was almost perfect. I probably
bought 20 copies of Slickedit as I moved from computer to
computer.
But gvim brought me back home!
