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Comment by fr0sty | Hacker News Reader

> ugh, syntax highlighting

Care to explain? I didn't know there was debate on this point.

There is no debate on my personal preferences. But do you actually think that everyone uses syntax highlighting?

Obviously Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike didn't need it and though I don't in any way pretend I'm in that league of programmers, I am in that league of editor users.

As crazy as it sounds, for the longest time I used notepad as my primary editor. Then I switched to Notepad+ (still no highlighting). I'm now on TextMate (mostly due to my switch to OSX), but I find the syntax highlighting to help in quickly scrolling through and finding segments of code. If I'm looking for a variable, I just look for that color, etc.

You're on your way... Come join the rest of us in the world of IDEs. Once you've seen your "editor" autocomplete a member from another class (in a namespace you haven't even imported), there's no going back.

I can do that in Vim...

Sweet. My Vim sessions generally consist of issuing a dozen random commands before I happen to type an "I", followed by exiting, restarting, and cursing. Glad to hear you're having more success!

At my 9-5 I have to use Dreamweaver (code view) and I have no gripes about the text editing portion at all. Maybe there just aren't any IDEs for OSX I've fallen in love with yet, but they all have a sort of clunky aspect to them that can be annoying and can't be changed. Any IDEs that are like TextMate but with auto-completion? (I've done my fair share of looking in the past 3 years on osx.)

Sounds awful, I hated all that stuff in VStudio. I'm one of those crocks that thinks it makes you lazy in your organisation.

    grep '^fname' *.c

is good enough for me

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