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Comment by jhaile | Hacker News Reader

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jhaile·

Uh..have you never heard of IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse? Or RubyMine? Or Netbeans even...

They pretty much do everything you're talking about.

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Yeah, why was the OP upvoted? Are there seriously that many people on Hacker News who have never used a real ide?

Depending on the language, IDEs are often not worth the trouble. I was big Eclipse and then Netbeans user when I did Java dev. When I started working in C++, I used Eclipse for about two days before I went back to vim. The Eclipse functions I depended upon most in Java - navigation, autocomplete, and refactoring - just didn't work all that well in C++.

IntelliJ IDEA has exactly what the author implemented, but IntelliJ IDEA can also take about 5 minutes to start up, and takes up all your screen real estate. When you work in 5 languages on a regular basis and just want your editor to start up quickly, that can be quite a pain.

Netbeans? There is a drop down of all open tabs, but that can't be filtered. There is also a window which shows open documents but for some unfathomable reason it can't be docked.

The only navigation I can see for open projects is the tree view which is painful for large projects with files scattered across the project (e.g. web frameworks).

edit: Ah, I see. The article wasn't about text editors. It was about how file navigation (within whatever environment you use) sucks.

Also, if you're using Visual Studio, you can either get Resharper or the free plugin StudioTools: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

Both add better file/class/method navigation, and I find them invaluable.

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