Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

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Eclipse, and I mostly hack in Python and Javascript. Why, why you say?

I guess just three main reasons:

1) I am a very visual person, and like to see the project hierarchy. I like to click the file I want, instead of just using my keyboard. I know this flies in the face of the purist Emacs and Vim users, but I'm only about half hacker, and I like my clickey click.

2) I like the tabs at the top (as opposed to buffers that you can't see). I like to see the group of files I'm currently working with.

3) I like the Aptana plug-in, which does nice mark-up of HTML, Javascript, etc. It makes Eclipse a fairly nice web coding editor. I also like Pydev. So Eclipse supports all my favorite languages.

I do wish Eclipse were faster and stripped of many of its components. Also, I do use the command line for things like SVN and running commands in the terminal like "python manage.py runserver." But I like Eclipse as an editor.

Maybe it's just because Eclipse is what I'm used to. I suspect that is the root of all preference.

Emacs can be very visual if you use ECB (check http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net screencast for an example):

a) A directory tree b) a list of source files in the current directory c) a list of functions/classes/methods/… in the current file, (ECB uses the Semantic Bovinator, or Imenu, or etags, for getting this list so all languages supported by any of these tools are automatically supported by ECB too) d) a history of recently visited files, e) the Speedbar (directory hierarchy) and f) output from compilation (the “compilation” window) and other modes like help, grep etc. or whatever a user defines to be displayed in this window.

You always get this answer from emacs users. "Emacs can do such and such."

But the reason Eclipse probably hooked me is it does these things out of the box. There's just such a huge barrier to entry to using emacs, that being the burden of configuring it to your liking and/or learning the arcane keyboard shortcuts.

I do a lot of day job programming in ColdFusion (no, really), and CFEclipse does the best job with handling ColdFusion code, Javascript, HTML, and CSS in a single file (Komodo Edit, using PHP mode, does a pretty good job, too, but it's a bit slow). Initially, I didn't want to switch because many of the keybindings I was used to weren't there, but after spending some time configuring the IDE, I use it for everything (including editing SQL scripts).

vim 7 has tabs the are sooo useful. :tabe filename to open something in a new tab and gt to flip between them

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