On: Unix as IDE

[bh42222]

For autocomplete, I don't know enough about vi or vim, but emacs has it:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1616753/make-emacs-semant...

For refactoring, that's just an advanced text across many files manipulation feature, and emacs certainly can do it, but you might have to work on your .emacs file.

The numerous other things sound like either things you can do in gdb or valgrind, or again just advanced text search/editing.

Now all of this is not elegantly pulled together. You need to create this for yourself, make all these tools work together by developing a development environment for yourself. But once you do, you may be surprised just how elegantly everything works together.

[irahul → bh42222]

> For refactoring, that's just an advanced text across many files manipulation feature, and emacs certainly can do it, but you might have to work on your .emacs file.

Re-factoring is text editing, if you consider parsing to be advanced text editing(which it is not). Consider a class Foo implementing method foo, and a class Bar implementing a method of the same name foo. When I am renaming Foo.foo to Foo.bar, a refactoring tool will rename based on the semantics.

Renaming manually will always require looking through all occurrences, compared to clicking a couple of buttons in Eclipse and being assured it renamed all occurrences without any false positives or negatives.

Also, the nature of dynamic languages make it harder to refactor:

    class Foo:
        def foo():
            pass

    class Bar:
        def foo():
            pass

    def a_func(arg):
        arg.foo()

Now, in arg.foo, arg can be an instance of Foo, or Bar, or Baz...In a large codebase, manually doing it will be a night mare.

I mostly use vim, linux and dynamic languages. But that doesn't change the fact that Eclipse/Java is leaps and bounds ahead when we are talking re-factoring.

Also, I use rope for Python. Though it mitigates most of the warts, it can't mitigate the issue in the snippet above. There is an `unsure` mode which renames when unsure, but that's not a smart thing to do on a large codebase.