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Comment by jmhamel | Hacker News Reader

Hi! Perhaps the people of HN can offer some advice:

I’ve happily been using Emacs for about a year now, with loads of customizations from where I worked. Now that I no longer work there, the customizations don’t really make sense for my own projects. I started from scratch today, and now I totally hate emacs! I want to just start coding, and not spend a whole day setting up my IDE. Do you have any suggestions for other IDEs/reasons for me stick it out with Emacs? (I’m on a mac, doing mostly rails and node development btw)

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Intellij IDEA. Hands down my favorite piece of dev software I use.

Idea is abysmal at editing ruby/node, even with the plugins for those environments. He could grab webstorm and ruby mine? but that would be quite an investment.

It would be an investment, but for a software developer these are professional tools. The problem, though, is that free alternatives exist for those who don't mind a learning curve.

Oh I didn't mean exclusively in terms of time. Using a quasi open source editor means you are invested into the future of the editor itself (see TextMate). Having said that, Jetbrains has been around for a while and Idea is kick ass for Java.

Well yes for Ruby and Rails you would use RubyMine (Webstorm is included in it anyway), not InteliJ.

I only know PhpStorm but I don't regret the investment, time and money-wise (bought it on sale though).

Why? It's the exact same plugin code. The. same. plugin. code.

Sure, the SDK is the same, but the UI is tottaly different. Just setting up the project in Idea will take a day or two (because the UI is bad).

You're looking for Sublime 2:

http://www.sublimetext.com/

(Note: I personally use vim, so I'm not plugging Sublime based on any bias.)

Actually, Sublime Text 3 [0] (although in Beta) is quite stable and already has massive support within the community. I was lucky enough to get started with ST in my early days (not too long ago, tbh) and I haven't felt the need for a full-fledged IDE yet and I whole-heartedly recommend it for someone looking to move from (IMHO) bulky IDEs like Eclipse to a more minimalistic editor.

ST3 + SublimeIntel + SublimeLinter and suddenly, I feel like a keyboard ninja. Believe me, for a newbie, that is a massive boost of confidence! :D

[0]: http://www.sublimetext.com/3

Do this support C++11? there's already some days I'm looking a new IDE/text editor with real C++11 support to I switch to. Also, I can change the theme too, right? this black isn't very good to my eyes.

It's just a text editor, so there isn't much to support.

So there's no any text editor with C++11?

Yes you can change the theme.

Sublime is a text editor, so it doesn't offer debug/refactoring or other IDE features for languages out of the box. But you should find plenty of plugins that can help with different things, and it will syntax highlight just fine out of the box. What type of support are you looking for?

Sublime is an awesome text editor. It is not an IDE. Most notably lacking is any project level code intelligence. You can't, for instance, click a method name and go to its definition and this is not easily solved by a plugin. You also can't get intellisense for custom functions. I love Sublime as an editor, but the lack of those two things make it a poor IDE for any project of any complexity.

I'd agree with that. ST seems to strike an almost perfect balance between flexibility and pragmatism.

Become agnostic/independent.

I use nano, gedit, eclipse, slick, sublime, whatever's on the machine I use at the place I work and available in the situation.

I don't think a good IDE holds you back, but if you can learn to live without one then you're probably ahead of the game.

That said, I'm just an old C hacker, so what would I know...

If you switch computers often, this isn't bad (although I've rarely met a machine that doesn't have vim installed). But outside that, what's the rationale?

There's a lot to be said for knowing keybindings, shortcuts, syntax highlighting, file menus, etc. I can program 2x times faster with my .vimrc than a fresh vim install.. and probably double that again with a strange editor I've never used. I'm not saying vim is better by any means, but rather that familiarity is.

I'm a contractor so I switch roles and projects a lot. Much of the time the project is already in full swing and tightly bound to a particular IDE by the time I'm brought in (which is usually because something has gone very wrong and they need help).

I find that being as IDE agnostic as possible, rather than coming to rely on the features of any one IDE (or editor or whatever), helps me just dive in and get going faster.

Raw speed at churning out lines of code seems a lot less relevant to me as time goes on.

Not an IDE but a great programming tool on the mac: Dash: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dash-docs-snippets/id4580348...

Vim user, but in general: the advantage of text-configurable editors is that you can carry your configs around with you.

If you find you've got customizations you don't need, organizing them so that they relate to specific functionality which you can activate / deactivate as needed is a Good Thing.

The advantage of vi/vim or emacs over other alternatives is that you very nearly always have them available. A significant downside of any given IDE is when it's not there for you.

I used to hold this logic. Currently though, I'm using Sublime. I've found that the situation where I need a console editor isn't overly common. When I do, I just page in the vi key bindings tweak a file or 2 and move on.

I usually use Aptana (Eclipse based). It still takes me the best part of a day to set everything up the way I like it so I don't know if you will gain anything.

jedits nice and has lots of plugins available through the preferences - http://www.jedit.org/

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