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I don't have much experience and I hope you guys can help me, because nobody around me can.
I am starting to work with Vim and I am setting my vimrc now, but that's a lot of work, and I want to focus on learning how to use it, and not waste my time for now on configuring simple stuff like text highlighting or indentation, things that everybody has... So I want to use this vimrc https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim which is generally provided by Steve Francia.
The problem is that he uses gitHub, and I want to have everything locally on my machine, can you tell me how to do that? Including all the plugins, of course.
... that's a lot of work ...
Be prepared to continually spend some time to learn new Vim skills and improve your configuration (or chose a different editor / IDE that offers a more carefree, but also more restricted experience). Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, has made a compelling case for good habits of text editing. Trust me, it's not a waste of time, but you need to overcome your need for instant gratification.
I would suggest just turning on the indent and syntax features you mentioned, and call it it a day. Don't worry right now about extensions you don't need that load themselves.
$ cat > $HOME/.vimrc
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on
^D
$
Yes, I use something like his setup (I use Pathogen) and sure, it is kind of cool to just be able to clone a git module into my .vim/bundle directory, but that's an elaborate configuration that's just a distraction for you right now.
The absolute minimum you need for programming in Vim is in the accepted answer. I'd add set hidden and a few others to the mix but you don't need much more. Especially weird shortcuts that hide native features or useless Git integration plugins.
Don't install any plugin from the start, actually, especially piles of crap like that kind of "distribution". Follow $ vimtutor, multiple times if needed. Learn how to use :help. Don't copy anyone else's vimrc verbatim and, if you take something from a random vimrc on the net, read the relevant part of the documentation to be sure that you understand what it does, how it does it and why. Your ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim/ will grow and shrink with you, as you go. That's how it's done.
If you are looking for beginner-level info, LearnVim is a rather nice introduction to Vim that you install as part of Vim's documentation. I'd suggest you install it and read it carefully: it's opinionated but full of low-level information that will doubtlessly help you in the future. I sure would have loved reading it when I started.
Like Ingo said, if all that seems overwhelming nobody will mock you for deciding to use another editor/IDE. Of all my team, I'm the only one who uses Vim (hell, I don't even use it for everything) and the code we write is equally good and/or bad.
Anyway, if you really want to go the "distribution" route, you'll have to learn Git and Github's basics and follow the instructions provided by the distribution's maintainer.
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I know that this question has been asked many times before. However, I want to take everything that I have read about Emacs/Vim from other posts, give my own understanding of the situation, and request feedback from senior developers.
Here is what I see as the advantages of each type of IDE:
Advantages of Modern IDE
Many features work with little hassle or need to configure like: Text
completion / autogenerating closing tags Useful warnings tailored to
the language
Solving issues like the ones above often require a
significant time investment. I know that you become faster at finding
and installing the packages you need, but it seems like every
extension you need in a traditional editor is much more readily
available or already built-in in modern IDE / Code editor.
For compiled languages like Java, IDEs like IntelliJ seem to have a clear
advantage in the way they are able to analyze code and for the robust
debugging they offer. As far as I can tell, even if you spend a lot
of time configuring Emacs, there is no substitute for IntelliJ even
no matter how much time you invest.
Emacs/Vim Advantages
Though there is a lot more time investment, it seems like there is a strong consensus that the time investment has a significant payout for many developers. I do not necessarily even know these benefits, but I just know that Emacs/Vim is a very powerful and loved tool by many many highly experienced devs.
Extensibility
Availability (you can use either in a terminal very easily)
Great for SSH
Full org mode (versus the much more limited org mode in VSC)
Model-editing / Vim keybindings can make editing much faster once you learn it. Also, key chords in Emacs can make you much faster and keep you on the keyboard.
Related to above, but it seems that the more you commit to Emacs, the more you can get out of it because of the extensibility. Whatever your work flow is, usually there is a way to set up Emacs to take care of the whole nine yards for you.
I am guessing because of the above, it probably helps with your focus. You can keep everything inside emacs.
So my only big question is, "Do I have an accurate understanding of the advantages of each IDE?" A harder to question answer for me is, "Do I want to invest more time in learning Emacs or Vim?" (sidenote: will probably go with Doom Emacs) Right now I have been programming for two years. I am currently learning Javascript to help me get employed and will be focusing on that for months in the future. I keep going back and forth on whether I should just go with VSC and focus on Javascript or if I should learn Emacs concurrently.
I would recommend activate a Vim plugin within your IDE. That way you will learn bit by bit without affecting your productivity. After some time you can judge by yourself if it is worth learning more and go full Vim or just use the IDE. I use Vim for 5 years and I still have to take a look at the Vim documentation everyday. But I do it because it is fun to learn to do complex text manipulation with few strokes. If Vim does not suit you, try Emacs, then. But only trying each one will tell you what fits your style.
Here is a quick intro to Vim
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Before you light all fuses; I know this might come off as quite opinion-based. I am asking for functional differences, not "is X better than Y and why".
I have been using fuzzysearcher-plugins for some years now, as my previous employer quickly made mockery of me for "needing to actually SEE my files". I've been getting along with CtrlP for a while, but more often than not, when I see a Vim-user whip up his environment, there's NERDTree.
Am I missing out on any important functionality?
Depending the the nature of your project the structure could be very important. It maybe helpful to see you project files. However the use of an always open NerdTree instance is probably not worth it. Please see Oil and vinegar - split windows and the project drawer.
As for exact functional advantages of having a file explorer always open, I seriously doubt it. I think you would get much more usage out of something like projectionist and of course using a fuzzy finder like you are currently doing. Personally I use Tim Pope's vinegar so that if I need a file explorer it is a simple - away.
First you have to understand that Vim already comes with a rather powerful file explorer called netrw (:help netrw) so there's actually no real hard need for another file explorer plugin like NERDTree. But netrw is not really designed to be used as a "side-panel" like those found in other editors and IDEs: "desire" for that feature is what prompted the creation of NERDTree which closely mimics those "side-panels".
Both NERDTree and netrw give you a familiar file navigation interface that's quite handy when you don't have a good knowledge of the project you are working on: they give you a comfortable experience and therefore are quite valuable.
When you know your directory structure well or use alternative means of navigation (I'm thinking about tags), a file explorer — especially one that's "always on" — is not that useful and it's quite legitimate to prefer the simple :e and/or :find or the higher level abstraction provided by CtrlP, FuzzyFinder, Command-T and friends.
I usually prefer :e, :find, :tag and related commands to using a file explorer but there's always a time when using one is more efficient and, when that time comes, netrw is only an :Ex away.
Both navigation methods are not mutually exclusive at all.
A core aspect of the issue worth discussing, IMO, is the perceived need for such a "side-panel". Do we really need to have a list of the files in our project visible at all times? What's the benefit of such a feature when you consider that you never look at it and, really, never use it unless you need to open or interact with some files? Since you have to switch your focus from the editor to the file explorer anyway, why not simply, well… "open" the file explorer when you actually need it? Of course, the NERDTree window can be toggled but, most of the times, it's just left open. Simply because that's what most people are used to.
Now, comformity, lazyness and ignorance also come into play: NERDTree is listed as a "must have" in every blog post and, AFAIK, it's also provided by default in every crappy distribution so people often install it right away, without even knowing about netrw. The same could be said about CtrlP, of course.
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I'm a long-term Linux developer, and I've been using Eclipse to do all my coding for years. It's got decent syntax highlighting for a range of languages, good project management, top-notch integrated VCS support, and its Java support is superb.
Unfortunately it's also huge, rather clunky, and has a number of bad habits ranging from files disappearing irrevocably if you accidentally undo in the project view after creating a file, to mysterious lockups where it will sit and think at 100% CPU for a minute, to an extremely clumsy package manager that seems to become more and more fragile the more stuff you install with it. So I'm looking for suggestions to an alternative to Eclipse that I can try.
There are, however, some provisos.
There are two main styles of IDE. There's the Eclipse style, where a project is a directory; moving files in the project moves the files in the directory, so the project view can be treated as a file manager. And then there's the Visual Studio style, where the project is an abstract thing that does not necessarily match the layout on disk, and a project can contain files from multiple directories and moving files in the project doesn't touch the disk. This latter style I cannot stand, as it simply doesn't match the way I work. Unfortunately most Linux IDEs I've found work like Visual Studio. e.g. qtcreator, netbeans, monodevelop, etc.
I must be able to create a raw, unmanaged project, where the IDE doesn't try to build stuff, debug stuff, or touch the files in any way other than just editing them and managing them. This is because most of my stuff tends to get built from the command line. For example, Code::Blocks, which otherwise looks excellent, insists on all projects having a managed build system with build configurations etc, and won't take no for an answer, even if said build system is totally irrelevant to what I want to do. Integrated build systems are all very well but if I can't just point the IDE at a directory full of files and edit them, I'm afraid it's useless to me.
The languages I work in are C, C++, Java, Lua, shell script, Vala, and a myriad of other things, so something with decently robust syntax highlighting would be nice.
I realise that I'm being quite picky, but IDEs are a very personal thing, and, well, that's how I work. I don't dislike Eclipse enough to warrant changing my workflow, but I would like to know if there's something better out there that I can use with the same workflow...
I'm not really a very experienced programmer, I only have about 3 years of experience, but during those three years I have become completely disappointed with every IDE that I used.
I tried Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA (that was the most horrible of them, probably), Qt Creator (this one was the nicest, for Qt projects). All of them were too slow, clunky, too "intrusive", had a lot of features I didn't even need and using them was a real pain. So here is what I did.
I uninstalled all those IDE's, installed the good old gvim text editor, downloaded a nice color scheme for it, installed a good font for programmers (terminus), installed a few nice vim plugins, learned the VIM commands, learned how to use my tools (GNU make, g++, cvs, git etc.) and lived happily ever after.
The advantage of Vim is that it's lightweight, does not hog up your system's resources, does not tell you what to do, yet it is powerful enough to be one of the best text editors out there.
However, if you find Vim hard to grok, I suggest that you try Geany, a lightweight text editor for programmers. Also, I have recetly checked out Code::Blocks and it seems close enough to be good. It's not good for Java development, though, but for C++ it's decent. So, you know, pick your poison :)
How about JEdit?
I highly recommend Intellij Idea. As of about a year ago they've got a free Community Edition.
Since you are using Linux why not use xemacs (http://www.xemacs.org/)
To get an idea how to set it up for various languages you can look at this:
http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packages/html/prog-modes.html
Then for Java, you can look at http://jdee.sourceforge.net/
Emacs is very flexible, so you can get it to work as you desire, but, it will require more effort on your part that using a standard IDE, such as Eclipse.
When I don't want to wait for Eclipse to load I just use gedit - it's fast and has syntax highlighting.
You can open the sidebar to jump between open files or use the file browser and the bottom panel has a terminal to make in. If you use the External Tools Manager you can add custom scripts to be run by any shortcut key combination.
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What good IDEs are there for R in Linux?
I've tried Rcmdr and Eclipse, but neither seems to have the same usability as Tinn-R in Windows. Are there any other options?
A newcomer to the scene, which IMO looks very promising - and downright baller - relative to other existing IDEs like Rattle and JGR, is RStudio. It's free software, is cross-platform, looks very polished, and even has features like automatic refactoring.
Update 2012-04-12: I've been running it for a bit on our DB server, and I love that it's a web app that saves your sessions, resume-able from anywhere else. Plotting requires not only no X tunneling or png-writing but is easier to use than out-of-the-box R. Extremely easy to get up and running, and it comes with packages for Debian/Ubuntu (which I use).
The company/development is moving pretty fast, aiming to be the de facto standard IDE for all R users. If I'm gushing, it's probably because I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the IDE after a long time of using sub-par IDEs, not just for R but for plenty of other languages. So this was a bit out of the blue. I still need more time to really dig into it but I like what I'm seeing so far.
JGR isn't bad:
http://rforge.net/JGR/
Most people I know rave about Emacs + ESS:
http://ess.r-project.org/
But it's not quite the same thing as Tinn-R.
Along different lines ...
If you're looking at a high level functions for data mining, then Rattle is an option:
http://rattle.togaware.com/
and another high level app for interactive plotting:
http://code.google.com/p/playwith/
I have found that the Emacs-ESS combination is well worth the learning curve. I enjoy being able to:
have code and R console side by side
send the current line, paragraph, file, or function to the R console without touching the mouse
easily interact with R sessions on remote computers
enjoy all the editing abilities of Emacs
Here's the website for the project:
http://ess.r-project.org/
Here's a helpful document about ESS in particular:
http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/Refs/ess.pdf
Brand new IDE out there (as of Feb 2011) is http://www.rstudio.org/. Seems very promising from what I've seen so far.
Although Eclipse was mentioned by the OP, I do not know if he ment it with the StatET plugin.
Eclipse with StatET is a really great IDE besides e.g. EmacsSpeaksStatistics (ESS), but as in other environments the user have to learn it's the basic usage first. The only handicap of this IDE could be the relatively high resources requirements as based on Java, but this makes the program OS independent of course.
Why I really would suggest to take the time to learn use StatET efficiently (cauction: very subjective list!):
be able to run your code really fast and easily with comfigurable shortcuts (by Ctrl+r by default),
thanks to the script editor and running environment is heavily integrated, debuging and reviewing your code cannot be easier,
configurabled environments by default (e.g.: R scripts),
you may define templates for frequent commands and those's environment (e.g.: loop, if conditions etc),
highly customizable syntax highlight,
TeXlipse integrated to view and edit tex code with ease (LaTeX support for Eclipse),
Roxygen support for literate programming (very handy at package development to automatically generate Rd files (manuals) from inline comments),
easily extendable with othet Eclipse plugins (e.g.: spell checking, (SQL) database management, image viewer, running external programs like Sweave).
A nice guide to read is A Guide to Eclipse and the R plug-in StatET by Longhow Lam.
Gedit + RGedit plugin + Snippets plugin
You've suggested eclipse; there is a plugin called StatEt which work quite well (even Sweave is supported!).
There is a KDE 4 based IDE called RKward. It's nice because of:
Workspace Browser
Integrating the R console
data.frames editor
Syntax colored editor
GUI frontend for installing CRAN packages
For my case, I would recommend RKward for linux, it is a KDE. I've been using RStudio in Windows, but when I switched to Ubuntu, I find RKward easy to use, and has a good interface.
You can create a data frame without coding it with data.frame() function.
If you are used to Eclipse, StatET (mentioned by mbq) is probably the right choice for you.
That being said I have a more exotic choice to offer that you might want to consider, if you like auto suggestion and pure syntax highlighting is not enough for you. At least for me auto completion of R-Code did not work with StatET.
Now I use Komodo Edit with Sciviews-K and R64. Sending Code from editor to R works really well and the editor offers auto-completion for R-Code which is really nice – in particular if you are new to R. I work on a Mac, but it should be easy to setup for Linux too.
I think it has lost some popularity because it wasn't to stable in the past, but at I feel it's much better now and it hardly crashes in my setup. So you might wanna give it a chance too.
EDIT: If you work on Mac Textmate with the corresponding R bundle might be interesting, too. Recently I am about to switch to Textmate. If you don't care about the $45 for textmate, it's probably the most stable choice I tested so far. But it's only available on a Mac. But hey I am really amazed by this editor (and as you can see I like testing setups ;).
EDIT: I realize this thread is still being read by someone, so I definitely need to mention RStudio. It came out of nowhere and quickly became the choice of a lot of people. And it's well deserved. It still has some bugs (like not being able to stop RSessions) but it has tremendous auto-complete with context help. But at least on my setup (Mac) it's more stable than StatET / Eclipse. Sweave and ROxygen is not really supported yet, but the developers are very active. Definitely worth trying.
EDIT II: Because it's fun to track this here's another edit. RStudio continues to win more and more users. The combination of RStudio, Roxygen2 and particularly knitr integration has likely been the largest contribution to this development. While Rstudio was rather used by applied users and in teaching and has improved to dramatically that there's isn't many situations in which another IDE / editor is a better choice. Being maried to ESS seems like to only valid reason left to not use it. Also the documentation of its ecosystem is just great. The latest: Package development by Hadley http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html and his advanced programming http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
I strongly recommend learning emacs+ess, but for a more modern-looking interface you can try RKward: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page.
I use Geany in combination with R. Geany provides a terminal in which one can start an R session and shortcuts an be defined in order to send highlighted text to the terminal.
www.geany.org
RGedit, great tool if you're keen on GNOME default text editor. Lacks autocompletion in script mode, though... but you can define snippets in a separate plugin (Snippets)... You can send code directly to R session running in the terminal window, tabbed multiple R sesions, there are several GUI templates for common data analysis (t-test, correlation), long story short, take a look at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rgedit/
Few months ago (when I gave my blogging skills a try), I wrote a review for RGedit, here's a link (and a little bit of self-advertising):
http://psy-stat.com/?p=12
EDIT:
Oh, and you can use Geany and set it up so you can send code chunks to R session... I've never done it, but I know it's manageable!
EDIT #2:
here's a helpful link: http://sgsong.blogspot.com/2010/08/integrating-r-with-geany.html
This might be what you're looking for. It integrated Komodo and the SciViews package. I found it a bit too fiddley (I prefer vi) but if you're looking for a full blown IDE/editor for R in Linux it's pretty close to Tinn-R for Windows and it's written by the same guys!
Link:
http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html
Rattle: http://rattle.togaware.com/
Emacs with ESS. Probably not as polished as Eclipse, but I do like it.
Personnaly, I use gedit and my console. It works great :)
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Almost every developer that uses a Mac practically worships TextMate. Why? What extraordinary features does it have that other text editors and IDEs don't? I did a quick search and the only really useful feature that I found that most other editors lack is the column selection option, but I wouldn't use a certain editor just for that. What makes TextMate so amazing?
TextMate was the first app I bought when I switched to the Mac a few years ago.
The features I like most are:
bundle support
clean UI
project support
shell integration
fast for small files (fast startup time)
HTMLTidy built in
CSS and XHTML validation integrated (needs online connection)
but it also has some drawbacks:
slow for big files
lack of updates (for some time now, but TextMate 2.0 seems to be alive)
The main selling point is the ability to extend the UI using bundles, which are basically just shell scripts. It is also fairly lightweight.
I think the appeal of TextMate is that its not bloated ... its has just the right mix of text editing / IDE features, implemented in just the right way :)
A lot of editors have column selections (although in a lot of them its buried deep down). The actual fact TextMate is liked is it's bundle system, which makes some repetitive programming tasks much easier. It's not considered a replacement for languages that have IDE-s with "intellisense" support (Java, C#, etc.), but it's really useful if you want to create programs in a scripting language like ruby or python.
TextMate is very powerful and at the same time usable, intuitive, elegant and lightweight.
On the other hand e.g. the two most popular Unix editors Emacs and Vi(m) are both very powerful but IMHO(!) their usability is not up to todays standards. (I use all three of them but think TextMate is by far the best.)
I've been trying to use TextMate as a replacement for Emacs. So far I'm not sold, though I like projects, simpler/cleaner UI, and the idea that it's extensible using python, etc. (I've never mastered elisp).
Things I don't like [in comparison to Emacs]:
no ability to swap point/mark or return to previous marks.
movement keys don't automatically take you out of inline search.
tags not so great (ex: no symbols can be found in java files without classes).
completion only searches current file.
NOT OPEN SOURCE.
Okay, I still want to give it a fair shot, but mostly I'm just missing Emacs' superior functionality and feeling increasingly forgiving of its challenging UI and more willing to try to learn elisp for real. Even for projects, using emacs desktop-save in a project folder can accomplish nearly the same thing.
-taranaki
Textmate basically has all the power of <insert your favorite unix editor here> with a nice Mac OS X UI wrapped around it and a great plugin system using bundles, of which hundreds are available and most are either good or awesome.
Community support.