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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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I am trying to find a good IDE. I always found Vim's modal behaviour interesting but, Vim is more of a text editor than an IDE. Even though I have made a few changes to my .vimrc file Vim isn't IDE enough. Any suggestions?
FYI: By IDE I mean it's got to have a debugger, autocomplete and easy compilation
Edit: I do web development, backend node.js, python and Ruby on Rails
I'd start by listing features you need from your IDE in order of importance.
Think about (random order):
Language support (native support/need to import specific plugin)
project tools support (eg. cmake, maven, gradle, so you can easily switch between different environments)
editor power (make your changes fast, refactor easily, repeat changes, shortcuts and tricks etc.)
version control support
easy to use
completion, snippets, etc.
speed (how long it takes to launch, how much memory/cpu it consumes)
compilation speed/support
Of course you can consider many more features and find them much more important than the ones I listed here. It's totally individual preference, since that's you who has to be comfortable.
If you want to use the power of VIM you have basically three options:
1. use VIM, customize it and make it your unique IDE, totally adopted to your needs
Start with vanilla VIM and incrementally add settings and plugins you need. Check out existing configs and adapt them. To make it fully fledged IDE I'd recommend some plugins:
CtrlP - fuzzy seach, really powerful, must-have
NerdTree - classic file browser
vim-dispatch - for deployment, fast and easy
vim-git, vim-gitgutter, vim-fugitive - for awesome version control
xptemplate, supertab, syntastic - for autocompletion and snippets
vimgdb - for debugging
2. Use existing VIM config
I recommend one of these:
Example VIM configs
or this:
janus
3. Use IDE with VIM plugin/mode
Many of today's top IDEs have vim-mode or vim plugin easily available. For C++ I recommend QtCreator, because it's really fast and easy-to-use, and it's FakeVIM mode works really well. For JVM-based languages I recommend IntelliJ IDEA, because it's really powerful and stable. It's VIM plugin also works really well, and you can easily mix IDE's shortcuts with VIM commands, adapting it to your needs.
Both can be customized with many useful settings placed in your home directory (for IntelliJ it has to be .ideavimrc).
To be good at vim you need time, but it will eventually pay off
The mindset 'hunt for cool plugins to assemble your IDE' often leads to suboptimal solutions
Start with a small .vimrc and maybe a small amount of plugins (if you tell what is your programming environment people could help you here)
Use what you have for a while and observe where are you spending most of your time struggling
Search for a way to alleviate that problem and repeat
Get use to read vim help (:h). It may sound boring but is one of the best sources to really grok vim and that will bring you closer to the 'vim mindset'
Vim is an investment, not a tool you can decide to start using by tomorrow and be good at it.
If you want to spend most of your time coding (text editing) and are willing to put the time and effort it will pay eventually off and you would be very efficient. If you don't accept this it can be frustrating and make you quit.
Take a look at this: What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?
It also depends what your programming environment is. Having autocomplete and compiling from in the vim editor is no problem. Debugging depends, but you can also do debugging with other tools and be perfectly fine. Just because other IDEs do it doesn't mean it's the best way.
Don't try to get it perfect just from the beginning and don't try to copy every feature your known IDE has. Accept the initial pain and enjoy all those little improvements that you can make every single day. All those improvements will sum up and after a while you will be very proficient. Even years after you still will find ways to improve your workflow.
There has been recent development in (at least) those three projects, based on nvim extensibility, and addressing your very concern:
oni
veonim
gonvim
[update] lunarvim
I seems that they are all in early alpha though, let's hope the best for them :)
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This is more of an assignment work. I'm trying to help a friend debugging his Flash animation. Now, when I'm at his place and at his MacBook, he's using Adobe Flash to create his animation, with those timelines, the AS3 editor, etc.
Now, I want to help him while I'm at home, but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer, and I don't have a Flash license (he's got his from the school he's going to).
I know about osflash.org, but can I work the same way as he does in Flash? I need those timelines, and obviously I need to compile and preview the .swf files.
I should explain, I've never worked with Flash before, and the IDE is quite weird to me. The only way I help him, is by providing general programming skills (since AS3 is just another OO language). I was thinking of installing a cracked Flash version in a Windows VM, but that's not how I'd like to work.
Is there a better solution to this?
He's doing his work in AS3, as I mentioned.
Since you are not much familiar with the flash IDE you should be not at problem. Since the only problem with linux & flash developers is lack of decent IDE.
AS3 programs can be compiled with the flex SDK. So you simply need to download the SDK for your linux ditribution. However do note that there are no timelines in case when you develop applications with code. Instead you work with Timer events.
Flash IDE actually hides the Timer implementation in a easy usable (neat) way to provide anyone to create an application quickly.
FLA is a proprietary format for Flash CS and earlier files. No, you cannot use them with Flex compiler, because the later is an OOS software. But you can tell your friend to avoid using them. It is in fact very common to use them only to generate graphic assets, but not the code. The typical workflow is to compile SWC or SWF to use as a library and to write the code in another editor.
Anyways, some practical things:
Developing AS3 proper, you can use Intellij IDEA (some people even like it and use on other OS then Linux, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of it, but it is of the same quality as the most industry-standard level IDEs)
Your another option (which I'm using) Some good soul "ported" Flash Builder for Linux (Flash Builder is originally an Eclipse plugin developed by Adobe). It's story on Linux is fogged by a mire of inconsequential decisions. Once there was a trial version, but Adobe never released it for Linux. The trial expired, then Adobe granted continuation for the trial version. Later, they seemed to abandon the product entirely. I'm not sure of its current status, but you can find it here: https://code.google.com/p/fb4linux/
Your another option, absolutely legal, but problematic: FlashDevelop, it runs considerably well in virtualization and the devs made an effort to ensure the best they can that the virtualized version runs fine. It also runs (to an extend...) under Wine. I tried the later, but I tried it a lot time ago, it was far from being perfect, but it was workable. Here's the thread at FD forum on this: http://flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7621
FDT (from Powerflashers, a commercial IDE based on Eclipse) is said to run on Linux - never tried.
What I also used: Emacs with actionscrip-mode - it is barely a syntax highlighter. While using it I added some functions to run the compiler and debugger, but they are too crappy to share them :) seriously. So I won't.
More options:
Haxe, is another language that compiles to SWF. Less well-known, but considerably more advanced and more modern language. Besides compiling to Flash does a whole bunch of other things. I've seen it used inside MonoDevelop http://haxe.org/com/ide/monodevelop (haven't used myself). Similarly, it should be possible to use it inside FDT.
Haxe mode for Emacs (I'm currently trying to improve it, but it's not there yet), hopefully, in a couple of month it will be. Here's what I've gotten for now: https://code.google.com/p/haxe-mode/
Graphics:
It seems unlikely that you can find an editor matched to Flash CS in terms of editing vector graphics for Flash, but MXMLC (Flex compiler) can fairly well compile SVG. You can thus use Inkscape to produce some non-animated graphics... but YMMV
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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.
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I use full blown graphical IDEs such as Eclipse CDT (Linux) and Visual Studio (Windows) which have features like auto completion, built in debugging, etc. These are features that I feel I can't live without.
I keep hearing about how many people use emacs/vim on a daily basis. How come people still use console based editors when graphical IDEs appear to be easier to use? I know how to use vim and emacs, but for day-to-day programming I just use an IDE as I find myself being more productive.
This is not a vim vs emacs question so please don't argue one against the other, please instead argue graphical IDE against console IDE.
As I'm already familiar with graphical IDEs, am I likely to gain any productive advantage by using emacs/vim instead?
I expect the answer is "maybe not", simply because of the learning curve, and I'd miss the usual graphical IDE features such as auto complete and the built in debugger; but apparently emacs supports auto complete and debugging. However, to someone who uses a standard GUI text editor, I'd probably say that they should use emacs/vim. What do you think?
Related questions:
SciTE user wants to know if they should use emacs.
vi user wants to know if they should learn emacs.
There is an advantage to learning to master a command line editor for those situations where a full IDE is not available. I know people who swear by VIM and people who swear by Emacs. I think the latter is more configurable, but you might not even need that. Since you already know VI, it might be enough for your needs.
I humbly admit that in the few situations where I do need to edit not through an IDE, I just use pico... :(
All that being said, I do have the impression that for some people in certain programmer subcultures and companies, using emacs rather than an IDE is an issue of honor, like using leaves rather than TP on camping trips.
I would always suggest knowing at least one command-line only editor, be it Vi, emacs, pico, ed, etc., even if you do most of your developing in an IDE. If you're more productive in an IDE than in another editor, then by all means use the IDE.
That said, my reasoning is this: say you're installing a graphics driver on Linux, and the driver is not being co-operative. Your version of X doesn't start correctly using the new configuration, and you need to edit your X configuration. You could copy the backup of the working configuration over the edited configuration, start X, use a GUI editor to edit the X configuration, and then restart X, or you could do the edit very quickly using an editor that doesn't depend on X (typically, command line).
Eclipse has built-in support for Emacs key-bindings. The only support I've seen for Vim is a commercial plugin.
You certainly don't need to learn one or the other, and you don't need arguments extolling the virtues of one editor vs. the other, but if you do learn Emacs, you can customize your Eclipse environment to use the Emacs key-bindings (it's under Windows->Preferences->General->Keys). This (in my mind) can greatly increase your productivity in Eclipse as your hands rarely need to leave the 'home' line of your keyboard.
This feature is one (of many) reasons I use Eclipse for my 90% of my development.
I have been an emacs user for nearly 10 years. Emacs is an IDE with X support it is not console based. It does have auto completion it does have integrated debugger. The advantages i consider emacs over other IDE's are you said that you use eclipse in linux and visual studio on windows well i use emacs on both OS's. Don't need to change tools when switching OS's. Also on my daily work i work with multiple languages ruby,c/c++,java emacs supports much more languages than any other tool out there. And once you master using your keyboard you are 100 times faster than using an IDE. You can move around a file in blazing speed. i got my terminal , connection to my database server right in the editor no need to change windows and loose my train of thought. Another nice feature is i can edit files on machines half way across the world just like they are sitting on my local file system.
Disadvantages are both emacs and vi have steep learning curves in order to use them properly you need to invest some time on them but the way i see it why not master one tool that works on all languages and works on all OS's. then to learn how to use multiple tools and learn a new one when you wanna learn a new language.
Using emacs after knowing vim will make that task somewhat annoying. The editor war has been long and there have been many casualties.
In short, you should simply evaluate whether you think the editor(s) you are using currently are not up to your expectations. If you feel hindered, try something new. If you are working just fine, keep working!