IDE's and You
I’ve never been much of an IDE guy. I much prefer Vim, having spent about 5 years paying the price to become proficient at it.
Read on for my recent experiences with IDE’s.
At work, as part of our move to Java, we have decided to make Eclipse the IDE of choice. That is not to say that all developers will be forced to use Eclipse, but for new hires and those without a strong preference, it is the IDE we will foist on them.
I’ve tried Eclipse 2.x and was not impressed. The interface was clunky, hard to decode, and definately not as easy to use as Vim (though I say that as someone who has used Vim extensively for several years).
I was recently introduced to jEdit, which is much closer to what I would like in an IDE. It is light, without a lot of features, but it has an incredible file browser. I’ve since created a work-alike in Ruby-GTK2, which works well with Vim. It’s still not as full-featured as jEdit’s browser, but it works.
I’m in the middle of installing Eclipse 3, milestone 8, and I have to admit I’m feeling optimistic. Several developers here have been using it, and although it is still not feature-complete (at least one more milestone to go, due in about 6 weeks), it is supposedly much better than 2.x. Reading about it, it sounds quite nice, too.
So. I’ll try it for a little while, and perahps blog about it later.
