IDE's
A developer, a hacker, is a craftsman. A craftsman of the engineering persuasion, but a craftsman nonetheless. And a craftsman values their tools. To the point where one can become passionate about tools. Which is one reason I'm so glad to work for Tryllian Solutions -- they allow their developers to choose their own tools to produce the code with. When I arrived at Tryllian, I got the choice between a Linux or a Windows 2000 desktop machine, or a laptop with either OS. And if I wanted to put SuSE on that laptop, no problem. And no nonsense about company-wide standardization on one IDE.
So, for a year or two I used Nedit, until I saw a colleague of mine use Emacs -- the productivity increase of Emacs' word completion made me switch. (Nowadays, Nedit is unusable because SuSE defaults to a utf-8 file system, and Motif apps can no longer open files.) XEmacs has been the tool of choice for me ever since: I have used it to write three books, a number of articles and reams of code for Tryllian, but also for Krita and for Kura.
However, I'm wondering whether there isn't a switch coming on. Not to Eclipse: I truly abhor having that minuscule keyhole in the middle of the window for my code, with all the frills around taking up the rest of the space. Not to Netbeans: while Eclipse at least can handle Java and C++, Netbeans is Java only. And I hack in XML, Java, C++, Python and plain text. Beside, Netbeans is so ugly it must be seen to be believed. But KDevelop is a distinct possibility...
It has a good way of importing existing Java and C++ projects, and, being Qt-based C++, is easy enough for me to hack, so I can add some missing bits. Yesterday I already added a few lines of code to improve the Java ant support... A hackable tool is definitely an improvement over XEmacs, since I never got that far with Lisp.
KDevelop has more advantages. It's a KDE application, so the menu bar get displayed in my top panel. It has this nice IDEAL mode where the fringe benefits that take up so much space in other IDE's hide away when you don't need them. The class browser works pretty well.
There are a few missing bits, too. The word completion is quite intrusive. I prefer to have a keybinding that explicitly shows the next completion, instead of a popup. There seems to be no way to save indentation settings per directory tree. That's important when you're hacking on KOffice, for instance. Kivio uses two spaces, Koffice libs four, Krita one tab. I know that for some people indentation is a religious matter, but it's not for me. Everything is okay with me, although I tend to prefer a light, airy look with lots of whitespace. So I want to conform to the existing standard for every (sub-)project. There's no way yet to save some project settings for Java ant projects, and KDevelop does crash from time to time, and it gets a bit slow when all of KOffice is inside one project.
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