2008/8/1 Star Liu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'm really happy to get so much good suggestions, I will try the > following tools one by one, and send my use reports to this mail > thread. I feel that the first one I want to try is codeblocks.
Well, whatever works... > emacs > vim If I may so interject here, let me speak on behalf of these two choices. I will admit that I'm an acolyte of St iGNUcius and I worship at the Church of Emacs[1], but nevertheless, let me try to give a somewhat objective reason for why you should dedicate some serious time at learning either Emacs or vim, or at least trying to learn them. The fact[2] remains that coding without touch-typing or with excessive wrist motion *will* slow you down. Both vim and Emacs are designed to train you to rewire your cerebellum to move your fingers and wrists in different ways to get work done. Emacs is extensible; vim is minimalist, but their editting philosophies are more alike than different: make the user work hard to get through a steep learning curve in order to later ease transition into Deep Hack Mode[3]. It is said that flashier IDEs accomplish this better, but to me, after many years of Emacs, it's extremely uncomfortable to have to move my wrists to the arrow keys and away from homerow for tasks like moving the cursor or copy-pasting. There is another benefit to learning either Emacs or vim (or better, at least a little of both): they yield dividends elsewhere. For example, both vim-like and Emacs-like keys for motion and simple editting work in domains outside of both, like in less (the default pager when you look at manpages in Debian). Emacs-like keys are the default in any application that uses readline for receiving text input, and readline is everywhere (apt-cache rdepends libreadline5). Novices and the faint of heart will not like Emacs or vim. I say so from experience: I hated Emacs at first. But it grows on you. You should definitely give it a try. It's 30-year-old software, but it's been in development for 30 years, and it shows. It really does everything. vim is similarly mature, but still maintains for the most part its minimalistic approach. Have you let Emacs into your heart? Are you typing in its holy word, brother? GNUly yours, - Jordi G. H. [1] http://www.stallman.org/saint.html [2] Well, maybe not a fact, but I'm almost sure that if someone were to do a serious study on coding speed between Emacs-like or vim-like touch-typists and other people, the other people would lose. [2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-mode.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
