Comment by socialdemocrat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by socialdemocrat | Hacker News Reader

I don't like either extremes. I quite hate working in big bloated IDEs. But I don't like trying to accomplish everything at the terminal. I always use GUI and shell tools together.

My editor of choice TextMate is usually launched from the terminal. I work a lot in a REPL environment and when I get a stack backtrace my terminal program iTerm2 automatically identifies paths in the stack backtrace, so I can mouse click them and open in TextMate at the correct line.

I use a separate git GUI client called Tower a lot, but I also use the git command line. I mix and match a lot.

I really dislike monolithic tools. If you try to do absolutely everything from the CLI you get many of the same problems as in a IDE GUI: You get too much complexity in your interaction. Too many special keystrokes and commands to remember.

I quite like the old NeXT idea of an IDE, kind of how the old xCode was when interface builder was a separate program. As you integrate more tools complexity just grows.

We already have a multitasking OS with windows. We where meant to use multiple tools and not just sit in one big maximized monolithic program.

Textmate was my first love as far as text editors go. Such a great program! I had to leave it for vim eventually though for various reasons. I have no evidence but in its time I really think TextMate helped push text editors forward. I often see its influence in Sublime, Atom, and VSCode.

> iTerm2 automatically identifies paths in the stack backtrace, so I can mouse click them and open in TextMate at the correct line.

That sounds super convenient! How do I learn more? A quick search didn't turn up anything relevant. What should I be searching for?

> My editor of choice TextMate is usually launched from the terminal.

My issue is, I need an editor that knows that a field annotated with @Resource with a type and name of SomeService foo is injected by a DI framework and makes it easy for me to navigate to implementations of SomeService with a name of `foo`.

Sure, I could put hundreds of hours into half-way replicating what an IDE does. Or, I could just use an IDE that was written by people who've felt the same pain as me. TextMate might be good for the occasional Ruby or Python script, but even then - do I have to manually manage virtualenvs while working on this script, or can my IDE do it for me? (Spoilers: Intellij can)

My understanding is that people who want this sort of thing use a client server set up with a server that does all of the AST parsing and linting separate from the editor.

I feel like there’s a weird power thing some people get sucked into that ends in forcing everyone around them to use their preferred (often IntelliJ or vscode) editor often via the argument that the linter configuration only works in it.

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