

Ask HN: The best development environment you've ever used - ekiru

I'm not necessarily asking what development environment you use currently, but the best you've ever used.<p>What makes it so great?
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DanielStraight
If I could combine the simplicity of Visual Studio, the flexibility and power
of emacs, and the refactoring support of Eclipse, that would be the best
development environment ever.

As it stands, I would probably put Visual Studio in the lead.

I have a major beef with Eclipse for how projects are structured. The whole
workspace thing drives me crazy and makes branching and pushing and pulling
from remote servers a real pain in version control.

Emacs is simply getting old. It's amazing. It's seriously one of the best
programs ever written, but it would nice to have some more IDEish stuff
around. I know I could do a lot more customization to my emacs, but I just
haven't had the time.

If I could find a good editor which embeds or emulates emacs well, that might
be the solution.

~~~
kleevr
I used VS+VIemu at my last job (.net shop), and it started to feel kinda homey
after a while.

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mahmud
Borland Turbo C++ version 4.5. I used it without prejudice; I was too
inexperienced as a programmer to form opinions about programming tools, so I
used all I had with great pleasure and made things.

It was good to be able to just start impossible to code projects without
realizing their difficulty. Then, I felt like I could implement an OS "if only
I finished this chapter"; I wanted to write my own everything. I read other
people's code and copied it. I used to send thank you letters to people who
published their code. I used to be a human being.

I used to look for problems to solve, now I _find_ problems that stand between
me and a solution and I look for the quickest shortcut; download it, hire
someone, postpone it, you don't need it, etc.

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dannyr
Visual Studio.

It auto-indents your code making it readable. Excellent Intellisense.
Find/Replace within project and solution. Integrated debugger is full-
featured.

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dryicerx
emacs

Because you can easily flex and modify any aspect of it, for any need you
might have.

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dragonquest
Slickedit by far, if you dabble in more than one language. I don't use it
currently because of its expensive license ~300$, but it wins in sheer power
and features as a beefed up text editor.

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ganley
Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1984.

~~~
CyberFonic
It used WordStar (which was the defacto standard WP in its day) keybindings
and you were able to edit, compile run in less time than any of today's IDEs -
all on a 4.77MHz 8088 CPU with 64k RAM !!!

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p01nd3xt3r
vi

~~~
kleevr
yyp

~~~
p01nd3xt3r
What makes it so great is that it lets you focus on code instead of using the
program.

VS Studio, eclipse etc.. feels like I am using an application as much if not
more than I am coding.

~~~
kleevr
Yeah I recently dumped my .net job and ran for the hills. Now I've got my
slices /etc/host'd, and I can just sshfs in and gvim around to my hearts
delight.

(I actually got reprimanded for using gvim at the last job, luckily we struck
a compromise with vs+viemu.)

~~~
DrJokepu
Why would anyone at your job care about the editor you're using? Sounds like
unnecessary micromanagement to me. Why I can't understand why would you ever
pick vi over VS, but if they had a problem with your choice of IDE then you
were right to leave, sounds like an awful place to work at.

~~~
kleevr
I was learning C# (had just come from Java/Eclipse land), and I was using the
command-line compiler just to get comfortable and learn some in's and out's.

I was the first CS programmer they hired (I was still in school), they were
crewed up with a lot of nice guy MIS's... it was funny when they hired another
CS guy and he started doing the same things I did when I started, and getting
in minor trouble with management.

They also wouldn't let us use ANY scripting languages for anything...
everything should be compiled code based on "Principal", it runs faster and is
"strongly typed" which is philosophically "better" I was told without a
reason. Never mind that most of the other coders still used strings for
everything (especially numbers), and 50%+ of the code base was XML
serializers/deserializers. (Also the web apps were hideous,... WebForms what a
shitty set of web-dev metaphors.)

I also got in trouble for wasting my time writing unit tests, we were an
"agile" company with no time for tests.

Yeah, once I had a plan and some cash, I got the fuck out of dodge.

(ultimately, while still there, I ended up in vs+viemu, which I found fairly
productive, and would highly recommend it to any VS code slingers)

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yan
Environment? Xcode. Editor? Vim.

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pavelludiq
Unix/Linux.

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sarvesh
Vi on Unix and Visual Studio on Windows (with Vim bindings). Vi and Visual
Studio have one thing in common that makes them great, the customization.
Developers are very picky when it comes to the tools they want to use. We like
it to work in a certain way. Every good developer I know has his own
customizations that pretty much is unique to him or her.

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ilyak
I guess it's Factor UI.

It's nicely integrated (the words you've just added show up in help) and it
does really suggest interactive development (for example, by auto-importing
vocabularies for you).

I miss the built-in editor, tho...

