What makes a good IDE?

For me, a good IDE is an IDE that is fast and allows you to work at full speed. I enjoy VS2005 in emacs mode when I am programming in C/CPP/CS for example, but I am starting to get pissed off by the slowdowns and other annoying beta2 bugs.

I have just started using notepad2, and I am working on a version of notepad2 that supports all some common emacs kb keys.

A lot of people use different IDE's. What IDE do you use? and for what reasons?

Syntax highlighting
Code-collapse
Class-view
"Birds eye view" (something VS lacks)
Member listing
Autocomplete
Built-in compiler
SCCS support
RegEx-based F&R

That's all I need really.

Try notepad++ , it's really cool replacement of Windows Notepad

BTW: vim rulez

W3bbo... what exactly is this birds eye view feature?

Tyler Brown wrote:

W3bbo... what exactly is this birds eye view feature?

Like photoshop has the "Navigator" panel, showing you a bird's eye view of the current document, something similar in an IDE would be a picture of the current code file showing where the blocks are and what they're for, along with a red box showing the current viewport.

jozjan wrote:

Try notepad++ , it's really cool replacement of Windows Notepad

BTW: vim rulez

It seems pretty good. I will start using it, and I am going to extend it to support my scripting language.

Beer28 wrote:

Anjuta and Komodo linux. Eclipse CDT for debugging C/C++ as a visual gdb.
Netbeans linux for java.

They are all great IDE's. KDevelop on the other hand is what a not so great IDE is.

Too much content and too many wizards, not enough stability or usability, and lock-in to proprietary toolkits.

I messed around with CDT a bit. It didn't run too bad. I was running it on gentoo linux, and to me, eclipse runs horrible on linux. I tried Sun's and IBM's JVM too :-/

Only used netbeans on windows, half a gig of memory is too much for an IDE to take up. I used Sun's IDE + App server (for j2ee crap... yes... crap!) and EACH took up half a gig of memory. That was 1 gig for their dev suite. I guess its not the greatest idea putting both on one box, but IIS + VS for asp.net apps can be done on a single box with no problems. Not sure what their problem is with all the bloat.

Notepad2 is freaking awsome. I <3 that program

For perl, I used http://www.crimsoneditor.com/. It is very customizable, and you can edit all kinds of files with it.

Right now I have visual studio 2003 opened. A solution with 15 projects, and it is taking up 27mb of ram

Skeeterbug wrote:

Right now I have visual studio 2003 opened. A solution with 15 projects, and it is taking up 27mb of ram

Right on.

VS2003 is well-coded, Dreamweaver 2004, however, is content at using 50MB of RAM when only have a single HTML document open.

Scintilla is AWESOME. Notepad2 and Notepad++ are both using it for syntax coloring and other stuff. And is is so easy to customize it for a custom language.

KEYWORDLIST KeyWords_ASM = {
"add sub mul div mod exp neg inc dec and or xor not shl shr ccat getc setc jmp je jne jg jl jge jle jse jsne jsg jsl jsge jsle try retry catch endcatch throw mov push pop load fload unload call ret hcall ecall sleep exit",
"",
"_retval",
"func struct priority",
"var struct reg",
"", "", "", "" };


EDITLEXER lexASM = { SCLEX_ASM, "Script Intermediate Language", "MSL IL", "", &KeyWords_ASM, {
                     { STYLE_DEFAULT, "Default", "", "" },
                     //{ SCE_ASM_DEFAULT, "Default", "", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_COMMENT, "Comment", "fore:#008000", "" },
                     //{ SCE_ASM_COMMENTBLOCK, "Comment Block (not used)", "", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_NUMBER, "Number", "fore:#FF0000", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_STRING, "String double quoted", "fore:#008000", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_CHARACTER, "String single quoted", "fore:#008000", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_STRINGEOL, "String not closed", "fore:#008000;back:#FFFF80;eolfilled", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_OPERATOR, "Operator", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_IDENTIFIER, "Identifier", "", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_CPUINSTRUCTION, "CPU Instruction", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_MATHINSTRUCTION, "FPU Instruction", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_REGISTER, "Register", "fore:#FF8000", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_DIRECTIVE, "Directive", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_DIRECTIVEOPERAND, "Directive Operand", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { SCE_ASM_EXTINSTRUCTION, "Extended Instruction", "fore:#0A246A", "" },
                     { -1, "", "", "" } } };

It's just a matter of changing some keywords if your language has the syntax of a popular language, or you can also customize the scintilla parser for your language. this is a simple mod that I made to notepad2 to colorize some keywords.

That isn't an easy question.  An IDE fundamentally makes a
programmer's life easer and their code better, and it should be
faster and more intuitive to write good code.

By that definition you could say Notepad2 is a good IDE over
notepad or VI, you could also say that NetBeans is a good
IDE over notepad2 and with Visual Studio (any version)
being a good UI over NetBeans. It is all relative.

I could program using no IDE or I could program using
Visual Studio. What do I prefer? Well I like what is the easiest
to use and the IDE that makes my life easier, which is Visual Studio.
That is not to say that there isn't better IDE waiting in the wings....
Until an IDE reads what you want a program to do directly from
your mind and makes it for you it is not going to be the best it
can be and there is wrangling room with everything less than that.

To me, a great IDE is a IDE that gives me maximum productivity.

These are the keywords to a great IDE:
- Facilitating the developer with anything he needs that -can- be facilitated by software
- Automating or semi-automating anything that -can- be automated and is useful to be automated

Nice examples from VS 2005 are in my opinion:
- Refactoring features
- Code snippets
- Features for integration of application design and code (class diagram view)
- WYSIWYG features that respect the developer's point of view on layout

Kind regards,

David van Leerdam