Vim 6.4 available

[Yegolev]

I don't know what you coders use, and if you use Vim then you might already know that v6.4 is out.  No new features, all bugfixes.

www.vim.org

I will compile a 64-bit binary for AIX in the next few weeks if anyone is interested.

[Pococurante]

"Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems."

"Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned."

lolz *IX administrators
 

[Yegolev]

There are binaries on the site for Win32, DOS32, DOS16, OS/2, and Amiga.  Mac versions can be found at macvim.org.  Works great for me.  I have replaced Notepad in all of my filetype associations.  Of course, it's not for everyone, but if you can get over the initial learning mountain....  Syntax highlighting helps me write really dense code.

[Evil Elvis]

JEdit

[Pococurante]

I'm just teasing Yeg - but yeah there are no lack of good text editors that do syntax check/prompting and have built-in macro features.  And a lot of them are remarkably easy to use.  I was just tickled by the usual *IX mindset that productivity is "handholding" - marketing is its own entertainment.

[Samwise]

EMACS 4 LIEF BIATCH!

[Murgos]

I use VIM (err, gvim really) when I do stuff in Solaris/Linux world but only because I am familiar with it and haven't had to do enough work in that world to make vaulting the xemacs learning curve a winning proposition.

I saw an interview with the guy who wrote VI waaaay back in the day and one of the questions was along hte lines of "Seriously, whats up with the funky control scheme?"  His answer was pretty elegent I thought - "There was no such thing as a control key when I wrote it."

[Yegolev]

"There was no such thing as a control key when I wrote it."

Or arrow keys.  I would probably use Jedit or something on WinXP except that I actually need vim on my AIX boxen, and it does sixteen colors through PuTTY, and why not go with what you know when at home?  I could use emacs on AIX, I guess... nah.  Besides, after you use it enough to assimilate the edit/motion system, it's like using an abacus for math: really fucking fast.

I am not one to participate in technical holy wars.  I know someone who codes in Notepad and I don't give her a hard time about it.

[naum]

Been both an avid user of Emacs and VI, was heavy Emacs, but then doing a service partner deal for a few years, traveling around the country, most installations don't have anything more than a default Unix install, which means no emacs. Plus, for editing scripts, VI is handier, quicker, and has a good bit of the feature set of Emacs. Vim takes Vi to another level, and grants additional macro powers.

Sadly, I've forgotten all of the Emacs bindings (other than Ctrl-X,something-something…), VI hotkeys seem embedded in into my finger nerves, and I carry a decent sized .vimrc from machine to machine. I usually hotkey F7 and F8 to page up/page down (holdover from TSO ISPF edit days…), F3 or F4 to macro out and scp file to destination server. If you search around the net, you can find some really cool .vimrc enhancments, such as when you type "{", auto-magically have the editor add the closing "}" and position cursor in the middle at the right spot.

But the two things indispensable about VI usage are "%" to match braces (or some just have the auto-match toggled on to visually confirm) and the syntax highlighting that makes grokking code a much lighter task. Everyone develops their own favored command repetoire, but other commands are "z,Enter" to position the current line at the top and the incremental regex search power ("n/?") keys.  Much more efficient text editing driving from the keyboard… …I only load a GUI text editor for (a) debugging or (b) printing.

[Evil Elvis]

Hey, now.  I run JEdit on my schools sparc workstations, too.

[Samwise]

It's time for me to confess something.

I do most of my development in Visual Studio nowadays.

I deserve all the scorn you care to heap on me.

[Fabricated]

It's time for me to confess something.

I do most of my development in Visual Studio nowadays.

I deserve all the scorn you care to heap on me.

Uh, Visual C++/C# is a pretty damn good IDE and compiler. VB, as much as it is hated, is great for quicky apps since Java sucks and Delphi is all but dead.

Only Slashdotters and the inept hate Visual Studio. Crossplatform, yeah, GCC is great, wonderful.

...and as for text editors for coding, fuck that. Ancient crap that will hopefully be phased out for more intuitive IDEs. The day no computer geek remembers the eMacs vs. Vi debate is a great day for computing and programming in general. What sucks is the next unintuitive "I LIKE MY AMBER COLOR MONITOR AND 500,000 SHORTCUTS" crap program "hardcore" computer geeks won't let go of is LaTeX.

[Shockeye]

Does anyone use pico?

[Fabricated]

Does anyone use pico?

Pico is simple and easy for new users to pick up.

Therefore, hardcore UNIX tards will make fun of you for using it.

[Evil Elvis]

Only Slashdotters and the inept hate Visual Studio. Crossplatform, yeah, GCC is great, wonderful.

...and as for text editors for coding, fuck that. Ancient crap that will hopefully be phased out for more intuitive IDEs. The day no computer geek remembers the eMacs vs. Vi debate is a great day for computing and programming in general. What sucks is the next unintuitive "I LIKE MY AMBER COLOR MONITOR AND 500,000 SHORTCUTS" crap program "hardcore" computer geeks won't let go of is LaTeX.

Visual C++ 6's gui is pretty good.  .Net's gui feels bloated and slow to me, but if you're doing C#, you might as well use it.

[Samwise]

.NET took me a little while to get used to, but I prefer it over 6.0 now.  The dock/tab setup it has going is luv.

[Murgos]

My issue with the .NET ide is that if your are doing web stuff and try and use the auto-completion (the best thing about the IDE) you will end up with non-standards compliant HTML/CSS and/or HTML that is IE 3 (?) compliant...

If your doing Visual C++, VB.NET, or C# application development though then it is abolutely (and not surprisingly) the best tool for the job.  The built in syntax-highlighting, text completion and mouseover hints are as though the little bits and bytes had been rendered from pure gold.

The purist in me though still thinks everything should be banged out with VI in ANSI C at 2 a.m. in a darkened basement long after everyone else has gone home.

[ClydeJr]

Does anyone use pico?

Mmmmm!

Sorry, I'm hungry...

[Shockeye]

Needs more cilantro.

[Ezdaar]

What's your issue with LaTeX? When I'm writing a paper it's much faster for me to write it in LaTeX than to hunt for some graphic symbol nested in a hundred menus. I also don't have to worry about things like formatting, numbering, references or bibiliography(yay BibTeX). Plus, it looks so much nicer than everything else.

[Murgos]

...and as for text editors for coding, fuck that. Ancient crap that will hopefully be phased out for more intuitive IDEs.

Truly spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue about the software/hardware interface.  The day that WYSIWYG skill trumps knowledge of what actually is happening underneath all those layers of abstraction is the day that chihuahua's finally thow off thier mask of meek and timid behavior and embark on thier true purpose, the eradication of all mankind.

[Daeven]

I pretty much use Eclipse for everything now. I can configure it how ever the hell I want; plug in a C++ compiler, debug ruby, write shell scrupts. *shrug*

[Yegolev]

I am not a programmer.  Even worse, I have only had two different CS101 courses, one using FORTRAN in 1993 and one using C++ in 1999.  I really shouldn't be working in an IT shop for one of the largest corps in the world if you look at my background.  I write korn, perl and html/css; mostly the first two and of course I don't count sed, awk, etc.  I might see using an IDE for perl, but not the other two.  Honestly, the only things I need are syntax highlighting and an O'Reilly book.  Hmmm... folds are nice, too.

OK, seven O'Reilly books.

[Fabricated]

...and as for text editors for coding, fuck that. Ancient crap that will hopefully be phased out for more intuitive IDEs.

Truly spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue about the software/hardware interface.  The day that WYSIWYG skill trumps knowledge of what actually is happening underneath all those layers of abstraction is the day that chihuahua's finally thow off thier mask of meek and timid behavior and embark on thier true purpose, the eradication of all mankind.

That makes absolutely no sense. How does WYSIWYG preclude someone from knowing what's actually happening? Fuck it, let's just enter commands in binary.

[naum]

IDE is nice for debugging and printing.

Our entire development staff uses Macs (well, one of us primarily uses a Win/Linux laptop), but I am the only dinosaur still using Vim as my editor staple. I think everyone uses a different editor — one an emacs devotee, one uses the Zend IDE (when coding PHP), one uses JEdit, one likes BBEdit, etc.…

If I had to use a IDE on a fulltime basis, I would feel frustrated, too much reliance on the mouse, and often it is necessary to get underneath the seams. And the default behavior and autocompletion irk me.

But text editors are tools and people should use the tool that makes them the most productive. Which is why I find the whole text editor debates kind of silly. Other than having a decent edtior that offers:

* Syntax highliting (though there are some who don't think this is a beneficial feature).
* Regex searching
* Macros & scripts
* Matching braces
* Code folding

IAW, anything better than MS Notepad…

[StGabe]

I  Emacs.

Visual Studio just doesn't do it for me and I find I am indeed far less productive when using it directly (I just use it to build stuff).  I don't see what is wrong with wanting to be able to use a powerful tool that is highly configuragle -- which is what I think most UNIX users enjoy.  That's what I like about emacs.  Every alternative I have considered just doesn't have the flexiblity that I want or it if does it is buried under a bloated UI that just gets in my way.  I also just really like the unix key-mapping -- I hate using home, page down and end keys -- and I prefer to do use the mouse rarely if at all when coding which turns me off of a lot of IDE's.   I suspect I would get along fine with VIM but, as emacs does everything I want, I've never gotten around to trying it.  If I'm logged into some remote machine and need a quick editor then I invariably use pico.

Gabe.

[Kairos]

joe!

joe never gets no love.

[Murgos]

That makes absolutely no sense. How does WYSIWYG preclude someone from knowing what's actually happening? Fuck it, let's just enter commands in binary.

Dude, really.  If you use a WYSIWYG now and can't see how the abstraction forces you to code to someone elses model and design constraints (a good thing for some people and at some levels) and limits your creativity and ability to handle different situations in an optimal manner and works to obscure your knowledge of how the machine is functioning the way it does then you really shouldn't be having this conversation.

If you're talking about writing a Flash app so users can have a pretty login screen, fine use the WYSIWYG.  If you're talking about writing efficient algorithms that run in log n time on a standard machine good luck with that.