Seriously Impressive: Sun Java Studio Creator - Ubuntu's killer app?

[Pete Ryland]

On 14/12/06, Arwyn Hainsworth <arwynh+ubuntu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/12/06, Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> > On 14/12/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> > > Baloney.  I'd say that there are so many fallacies in thinking that you can
> > > save any time by hand-hacking code in primitive editors.
> >
> > Can you provide some examples of said fallacies please?
> >
> Let's see... for starters in the java eclipse environment there is the
> auto-import of used classes, the auto completion of valid methods and
> quick javadoc lookup for the method at hand.

Of course you can do auto-complete with vim, it's Ctrl-N.  This is
configurable too with a search order, and can lookup dictionary words
if all else fails.  See:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'complete'

K will lookup man pages on the word under the cursor by default, but
it's configurable enough to do javadoc too.  See:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/various.html#K

Of course it can all be configured to be different depending on the
file type you're editing.  See:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'filetype'

> Combine that with pre-compilation error checking and you've got
> something that saves a lot more time than an ordinary text-editor.

Syntax highlighting is enough for me to ensure it will compile, and
compiling is easy with :make which I usually bind to a function key.
This will place the cursor at the first error, and let you jump
quickly to any other errors with :cn and :cp.

You can also arrange for vim to be launched by the compiler on error,
and it will recompile as soon as you write out the file.  This makes
the compile cycle very quick.  See:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/quickfix.html

> Or Home, shift+down, ctrl-x, down, crtl+v.
> No need for the mouse if you don't want to use it.

That's still pretty slow and complicated compared to ddp, and still
requires re-positioning of the hands.  And that was just a *simple*
editing example.

> > Or how about auto-indenting a block of code?  How many IDEs offer
> > anything like that?  In vim it's as easy as preceeding a movement key
> > with '='.
> >
> Most of them. Actually many of them have a bit more advanced
> formatting abilities than auto-indent...

Well that's good to know.  I'm glad they're finally catching up.  Have
they implemented regex search/replace yet?  Or easy-to-use macro
recording?  Or easily filtering a block of text with an external
program?  Or even saving undo information between edits?  Or even
something as simple as changing the case of a word?

> > So how does it know what I want?  And how does this offset having such
> > an archaic text editing interface?
> >
> It isn't as archaic as you seem to think. And even if it was, the time
> saving the few examples I gave provide is enough to offset the
> 'archaicness' of it.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.  IMO, the need
for that sort of thing is really just a symptom of overly-complicated
APIs, or possibly the lack of a pre-compiler.  Last time I wrote
entity beans (which was before IDEs knew about them) I just wrote a
script that spat them out straight from the database schema.  And I've
since worked with a number of people who did exactly the same thing!
Thankfully I haven't had to write anything big in Java for about six
years now, since turning to sysadmin until the hype is over.
Ironically, syadminning java programs is probably even less fun,
although now I'm not really a sysadmin any more either.  But I
digress.

> > > > Just say no.
> > >
> > > Dinosaur.
> >
> > To be fair, vim and emacs are still being actively developed and have
> > huge user bases, and IMO are still superior to anything else that's
> > come along, so why change?
> >
> They are good editors, why should they not have large user bases? But
> when it comes to large scale application development, they lose out.

Well I've never seen vim slow down on a large application, but I've
seen IDEs slow down and even corrupt files or crash when multiple
large files are loaded.  Scalability is one of the key strengths that
vim (and emacs) have over IDEs IMO.

Pete