I’m sure this topic has been discussed a million times, but hey, here we go again.  A recent question came up on whether people liked their experience of Eclipse vs. Visual Studio.  Of course this brought up the advantages of one versus the other.  But is that really a fair comparison? It really depends.  What type of application are you building — a native Windows application?  Surely going with Visual Studio makes sense. But if the goal is cross-platform, then you might look at Eclipse.

Glad to see people are thinking about IDEs, but what really intrigues me about this conversation of one IDE versus another is that someone always has to add their two cents about the ancient text editors of the world.   Something like “real programmers use vi”.  Hold the phone.  Are we talking about the same text editor that requires you to memorize a gazillion key bindings?

I don’t get this.  I understand legacy use, as vi was the only available built-in text editor at the time and still is the only choice of hackers today.  But times have changed.  Anyone I’ve talked to who is using vi (or other known text editors like emacs) always seems very proud of it.  Maybe knowing how to use such a complex tool provides some self-worth.  I just don’t know.  Seems like it would be the same as me bragging about my portable Walkman or the 8-track player in my car.

Don’t the features of Visual Studio or Eclipse make you faster?  With a click of a button you can refactor your code.  With simple auto-completion the IDE eliminates simple typing (or even mistakes).  Plus with built-in tools for static analysis, test generation, etc., what are you waiting for?

So you vi/vim/emacs coders out there — tell me why on earth you are sticking with it. What makes you a better programmer using vi/vim or emacs?

I deal with many organizations that deploy the Klocwork software to the desktop so that developers can use our tools to help them find and fix bugs in their code.  The message is simple, fix your bugs before you check in your code.  Many of the organizations I deal with have a mismatch of environments and tools.  In the world of writing code it is not uncommon to find developers using Emacs, Vim, Visual Studio, Eclipse or any number of IDEs/text editors.  Nothing wrong with this, although it doesn’t offer a clean, repeatable environment but it does work.

Recently I keep running into situations where productivity seems to be thrown out the door.  Not only were the developers a mix of many (and I mean many) development environments but they made the decision to code on a platform that they do not compile on. They would write code in Windows or Linux then store their code in a central repository or some sort (in one case it was just NFS), then ssh to a different Linux machine and run the compiler on the code.  If the code fails to compile, look at that syntax error and go back to your other machine to navigate to the line of code and figure out the error.  Rinse and repeat.  Wow…