Re: Padre originator polls "Which editor(s) or IDE(s) are you using for Perl development?"

[gsiems]

in reply to Padre originator polls "Which editor(s) or IDE(s) are you using for Perl development?"

Now for the follow up question, which is "Why do people use the editor(s) that they use". ISTM that knowing which editors folks use isn't very useful if you don't know why. I see some of the folks commenting are adding the answer to that question in the comments.

FWIW, I voted. Since I really don't want yet-another-account-somewhere-on-the-net just to make one comment (and the Padre folks seem to hang out here), I'll leave my comment(s) here.

• vi(m) - because it's everywhere I go.
• nedit - for it's macro capability mostly, and there are times when I need to NOT have a unicode editor.
• geany - (mostly) remembers which files I had open last and automagically opens them back up.
• gedit - Gnome defaults to this one, and they have smart code snippets.
• perl -pi -e "s/.../.../" $file - quick and to the point.
• cat, sed, awk, etc. - some days I must just be a little masochistic. :^0

--gsiems

[wazoox]

Looks that we have the same approach :) I too use vi(m) because it's everywhere, nedit because I grew used to it and built a huge set of macros for it... Then I'm toying around with Padre though I'm not ready (will I?) to switch.

[jakobi]

In case of vim, we need to differentiate between

• first-plateau users (sticking to insert mode, which IMAO vim makes far too easy and comfty) and
• those who overcome this to actually use vim efficiently in normal mode.

These are two vastly different ways to use vi(m), comparable maybe only to the distance between, say, wordpad and emacs.

Still an unconvinced vim user: Do yourself a favour and check out the vim screencast series on youtube, some of the clips are real eye-opening little gems: The secret is touch-typing and muscle memory :).

Update: some related considerations:

• How large is the visual disconnect if padre were to invoke the user's preferred editor for nontrivial edit tasks into a possibly pre-existing editor instance?
• How much is the user hurt in his normal accustomed use, if a new independent editor instance is created?
• How much of a problem is the mismatch/lack of some offerings between IDE and editor, say for tag navigation? Just tiny a bit of extra mousing might lead to a significant workflow interruption...