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Comment by mjs7231 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very strange reason not to like a product. Care to elaborate why?

There's no such thing as a cross-platform GUI layer that doesn't suck.

Qt comes the closest, and it has all sorts of platform-specific hacks in it, some even visible at the API level.

If you're going to be writing something that's used as frequently and intensively as an IDE, then it had BETTER conform to the user interface guidelines of whatever OS it's running on. Those differ on Windows or Mac, and Linux doesn't really have any.

I definitely agree with your thoughts on this, but I guess I wanted to add that Linux most definitely _does_ have human interface guidelines -- they're just not the same for every flavor of Linux under the sun. Granted a lot of Linux apps tend to be "cross-environment", or just cross-platform in general, so it's less obvious than on Mac, for example.

But GNOME definitely has them[1], and newer projects which have dedicated themselves to a really solid HIG are gaining a lot of traction[2].

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/ [2] http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines

I guess the issue comes down to more people needing to _care_ about them :)

I used to think so, too. But then, IDEs and developers are kind of special.

IDEs are mostly just big rectangles full of text, which are eminently platform independant. Developers are special in that that we are very used to staring at terminals and logs, and are very accustomed to work with colored but unformatted text. Also, workflows tend to be very similar, across platforms and environments.

So that leaves us with not much reason for platform dependance, and thus Eclipse, Emacs/Vim/etc., and terminals. Even Visual Studio sports many things, but a native look is not among them. I guess XCode is the only really platform-dependant IDE I know. All the others could just as well run on different platforms or even do so.

So, umm, I respectfully disagree.

I can't speak for gfosco, but my guess would be that it's because in IDE-land "cross-platform" frequently means "written in Java" (as with Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.), with all the performance issues and not-quite-perfect platform look and feel that implies.

In this case, it runs using X11 on OSX, which is a terrible way of making software ;)

Am I the only one who uses PyDev?

No we're not.

I had bad experiences with Eclipse back years and years ago, but I'll try it again. It looks like there's a new release (Juno?)- That seems like a decent starting point.

One of the few. I am a PyDev user, but I have been migrating toward using ipython notebook for development and saving the code into .py files when I need to run in production. PyDev gets used to debug the resultant code when something goes wrong.

PyDev seems to heavy to me when you need to write a standalone script and too buggy at evaluating module dependencies resulting in bad tooltips. Ipython notebook doesn't have this problem because you evaluate code as you develop, so tooltips come from object introspection.

I agree about module dependency tooltips. I'm happy to hear I'm not the only one.

PyDev user here too. Although I don't use it directly anymore but through Aptana.

It works out of the box and also supports javascript/html/css/... so is ideal for developing webapps with a python backend.

Ninja looks nice, but nothing I saw in the screencast makes me want to make the jump.

Finally, I might have to change my mind...

There is a big difference with PyDev/Aptana that is not apparent in the screencast: its lightweightness!

* it is a 1.3Mb download (vs 126Mb).

* startup time is ~2s (vs 30+ seconds)

* memory footprint is ~28Mb after startup (vs 400Mb)

Now I'll definitely try it.

Update: the memory quickly jumped to ~120Mb usage, hope it's not a memory leak.

A couple of people used to use it a work, but then we all switched to PyCharm and haven't looked back

Agreed. There are so many bits of 'cross platform' software where the OSX build requires X11. Considering X11 doesn't come with the newer installs of OSX (and there's no media with extra bits), and stuff like Airs have space at a premium, the X11 option is pretty terrible.

Oh, the old saying "Write once, run crappily everywhere." See the other comments already talking about it crashing or having weird behavior. It's something I've come to after many years of trying cross-platform apps that involve a GUI... They are almost all terrible.

I hope the group who agrees with me is cancelling out all the down-votes I got for expressing a valid & common opinion. :)

We are indeed!

How about Komodo IDE / Komodo Edit, which are XUL-based applications?

Many users do value a good cross-platform application.

You really can't think of any reasons why a person would suspect a cross-platform IDE to be a waste of time? I stupidly downloaded the 141MB only to find out it requires X11 (ugh) on a Mac which isn't even included in MacOS anymore (yuck). Delete.

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