William Pursell said:
<OT>
Seriously? RCS is a little bit obsolete. Perhaps you
mean VCS as a generic term.
Actually I meant RCS as the generic .... a revision control system.
Possibly wrong. But always used to personally.
There's no way to respond to this without a flame war
erupting, but it is incorrect to say that vi is less
capable than emacs. Emacs is a great editor, and so
is vi. The fact that emacs can serve as an OS
hardly recommends it as an editor.
It's not an OS : it hosts a lot of things where "editing" is
required. This OS thing annoys me sometimes. e.g I send my emails and
usenet posts using it. Why? Because most of the time I am editing text ...
The primary features of vi that make it nice for
programming in C are good navigation bindings
(that don't require 5 appendages to enter) and
access to the full set of shell utilities from
within the editor (eg !!). The purpose of an
editor is to enable the user to edit a text file,
and vi's default command keys are highly optimized
for editing text that is C source code. (ie, it
is really easy to navigate in a source tree using
vi, with very few keystrokes)
Oh I see. You are unaware you can run vi as a sub system of emacs and
you dont like long key strokes. It seems you want the flame ware since
clearly you are a vi expert and dont like emacs :-;
It is easy to navigate in emacs too. Usually only people who haven't
tried it moan about "3 key strokes". You dont of course need so many in
99% of "basic" editing cases. The arrow and page keys work these days as
default!
(as an aside the ability to code, debug, document, revise, archive etc
from the same UI is great - most people dont have the patience to learn
the system so its not for people who are easily pleased with no metal to
learn new things)
Most modern shells are great IDEs.
OK... You want to play with the meaning of IDE...
A good IDE, Editor (like emacs / vi) would allow you to compile in the
editor so you can auto navigate to errors for example. Only someone
living in 1972 would compile in a shell now IMO :-; Also see notes about
context help (as an example) below.
It is tempting to use the newer, flashier graphical
tools, but in the end you will wind up wasting more
time when you discover that they don't give you
access to the tools you need, and you end
up back in the shell anyway.
Good IDEs just provide a front end to the usual toolsets
in my experience.
The difficult part of programming is design. Keying
I wasn't asking for lessons in design. I was hoping to keep it
specifically to the tools that help you as a C programmer. Help you to :
navigate code etc. In C.
in the program text is not the challenge. Expending
a lot of effort finding a tool that simplifies data
entry is a waste of time.
A programmer is amateur and inefficient if in Large projects you do not
use decent tools for code navigation and consistency generation. e.g
auto create headers, find locations of usage, refactoring etc. IMO of
course.
The plethora of smart editors also suggests you are talking
nonsense. Tools which aid the "keying in" are very important. Syntax
hiliting, autocompletions, context help etc. I think you need to
reassess what these tools can do. I know I would sooner hit f1 on a
function call and see its document there and then than have to switch
out of the editor and bring up man or somesuch. Hell, all good editors
give something like context help now. Who could see that as obstructive
in any way?
This apart from the fact, of course, that programming is not just
"keying things in".
Bottom line: there are a million different tools you
can use. Experiment with 5 or 6 of them, then pick
one and learn it well. And make sure the one you
Your advice is try them and judge them? I was asking for YOUR
experiences and how YOU use them and how you judged them to be honest.
Even I had figured out I could have tried them and seen for myself. I
was asking for advice on what YOU find good and why.
