Ask YC: What is your preferable development environment?

It's as portable as I can get without getting cramps from typing. I am looking to check out the Lenovo U110 when it drops though, in which case I'll run Debian 4.0 with Xmonad.

When you work in Lisp by making DSL's and generally problem-specific extensions, I think the next logical step is to extend the IDE to support it directly (especially if you use the extension in many projects). If for example you make a CSS DSL, it would be great to have full property completion support, syntax highlighting and the other usual suspects.

Two areas I expect to work on a lot is 1. making the operations of my IDE more "semantic" (as in, adapted to what I want to do. If it's easy to think about, it should be easy and quick to carry it out) and 2. Making a system of views that would let me bypass the traditional file-based view of a project. If you program in a mostly functional way, most of the time the load order and segregation into files is much less important than other possible views of the project.

Anyone else find that they are absolutely bound to emacs and no matter what else you try to use, you find yourself, like a turtle returning to the beach where it was born, going back to emacs?

P.S. I have nothing against vi, but you know, turtles and nature and all of that.

1. First I tried Eclipse. And tried it again, and again. I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest darn things in Eclipse, hated the interface, and it just seemed too complicated to me.

2. Switched to vim + commandline. Invoking gcc directly.

3. Tried emacs - decided I felt the same way about it is I did about Eclipse. Too complicated and I can't figure out simple things.

4. Switched to GEdit + makefiles; still doing a lot on the command line.

5. Looked for a good visual IDE; discovered Anjuta. Was really impressed and happy for about 2 hours. After 2 days and Anjuta crashed for the 1000th time in a row, I wanted to strangle the programmers who wrote Anjuta.

6. Discovered KDevelop. KDevelop is a pleasure to use. Feature complete, very productive, no problems. Got to first milestone in project faster than expected, primarily because KDevelop was so good to work in.

my mini and desktop are far more powerful than my 450mhz 128mb fujitsu laptop; i might get an eeepc tho, only iff openbsd can run all the hardwares

my iBookG4 broke last year, it's weird but i didn't miss her that much

php coda/code igniter on mas osx(using mamp)

Don't use lisp(s) enough to enjoy Emacs anymore.

I use a desktop computer with a Microsoft Natural keyboard, Arch Linux, Emacs, Emacs Lisp, the shell rc.

The elements I am most pleased with are the keyboard and the shell rc. I am also pretty happy with Emacs Lisp, especially its manual and commands like C-h c C-h w and C-h f. Too many administration hassles with Arch Linux though. To reduce hassles, I would buy OS X if I were not very low income.

Normal gnu setup ...

- ubuntu64, gnome, vim, bash, xterm, & git

- various langs - python, perl, Js, sql, c & basic LAMP stack.

- browser with firebug, dom inspector, html validator, js debugger, noscript

- commodity desktop hardware + 22" + good speakers.

I started using TextMate, but I find a bunch of things like how it jacks up indenting when pasting, and flashes when matching tabs. NetBeans handles both these things much more nicely.

Textmate is just more approachable when it comes to extending the editor, though, so I usually use it for odds and ends over Emacs. Emacs is great for well structured projects in well supported languages.

Just for the record though, I use linux with Gnome, Ubuntu 7.10.

Your dev environment matters less than having two or more monitors in my opinion, though.

For desktop app work: netbeans, java (!) either winxp or fedora 8

For mathematical work: Mathematica + win xp

For fooling around learning new stuff: fedora 8 + python

At home working on startup/contract work: Macbook running OS X 10.5.whatever the latest, vim, sometimes emacs or aquamacs if I'm messing around with scheme.

I also have a tablet with XP. My favorite editor for Rails is RoRed, but it only works for Windows :(

Most important : Flash Drive, IPod, and laptop or desktop and I can code wherever and whenever I want.

Lately doing Ruby (Ramaze apps) and JRuby (building Swing GUI apps using Monkeybars).

I use Netbeans for some of the JRuby stuff, but do most code editing in vim

I enjoy vim because it rewards me for learning new commands (referencing the "What software makes you happy?" thread).

C, Python, Common Lisp