Which IDE have you been most impressed by?

[pollsters]

Komodo

 16/14%

Padre

 2/2%

Eclipse

 1/1%

Netbeans

 2/2%

LSE

 1/1%

Delphi

 2/2%

Visual Studio

 13/11%

JetBrains

 12/10%

Emacs

 16/14%

Vim

 29/25%

Other

 11/9%

I've never used one

 12/10%

117 total votes

[talexb]

Well, from the late 80's, I'd have to say Turbo C -- from the editor, Ctrl-F9 would run a make on the C file, then launch the executable using the debugger. If there was a syntax error, it would come back to the editor and leave the cursor on the line with the first error, with errors shown in the bottom pane.

Coming from a situation where the editor, compiler and linker were all separate, this was magical.

More recently, I have to say that tmux is amazing -- however many windows you need, in whatever arrangement you need, showing whatever you need -- vim window for editing, log files, command line, whatever. So cool -- and you can detach, then come back to the session later, and everything's where you left it.

[choroba]

Back in the old days, Turbo Vision.

See also Re: Curses-based applications?.

[Tux]

I have *tried* many of that list and nonen satisfied my preferences. Most were very very disappointing. Almost all were just swallowing system resources that I rather use for production tasks.

My personal favorite development environment is elvis, just another vi clone.

[stevieb]

I've been a proponent of JetBrains for several years. They have a wonderful Open Source Licence arrangement which gives full access to their entire suite of software for Open Source developers. All of their coding IDEs provide use of all plugins across the board, so if I'm using IDEA (which is for Java, but I use it as my exclusive Perl IDE), Rider for C#, CLion for C/C++ or PyCharm for Python, I can implement the plugins I need to be able to use Perl in all of them.

To boot, of course vim is available across the board, so there's that.

I would have voted for vim, as that's all I use everywhere (especially when no GUI IDE is available), but my GUI IDE of choice has that inherent with a plugin.

I use Visual Studio Code for work with one of my clients (not by choice) and it works well with Perl (and vim) plugins, but I'd be rid of it if I could.

With JetBrains, I can even share my IDE configuration between dissimilar OSs. I have a single IDE configuration across my Mac, Linux and Windows systems. (To have vim work correctly, I have to have a consistent vimrc file on each system, but I digress... that's just a simple Ansible deployment).

[cavac]

I'm using vim all the time.

Back in the day, i used Komodo for a lot of development and debugging work. But with ActiveState's transition to cloud stuff (and then the end-of-support for Komodo) i sort of gave up on it. It's a shame, really, it was really nice for debugging.

[LanX]

My understanding was that it's open source and free now

https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-ide/

But IIRC it's using the XUL framework which was discontinued by Mozilla

My last client used Komodo extensively, without understanding its potential.

(People were trained to use the integrated debugger for try and error programming :/ )

Actually I liked it, nice intuitive package of features.

Alas I found it a bit slow for my taste that's why I resorted to Emacs.

[cavac]

But IIRC it's using the XUL framework which was discontinued by Mozilla

That is one of the many problems of Komodo and why nobody has taken over the maintenance. (Frankly, *any* project depending on the codebase of Mozilla is screwed, there are always random design changes by the foundation popping up that make no sense).

I'm looking at the Dockerfile right now. It starts by requiring Ubuntu 17.04 as a base image, then downgrades gcc 6 to gcc 4...

The build instructions for Linux are just as bad. Not only do you need to use a g++4.9 and Perl 5.22, you also need to (somehow) get a Mozilla version from 2014 running on your system.

True, not everything is ActiveStates fault, their main one is that they trusted the Mozilla foundation to, for once in its existance, do the right thing and provide long time backwards compatibility for XUL, one of their most hyped features at the time.¹

The sad thing is, without a major, major rewrite Komodo IDE is totally dead.

---

¹ The foundation and its firefox developers are also responsible for WebSQL getting dropped as W3C standard proposal in favor of their awful, idiotic "database" design that's just a key/value store with a badly designed API. This made my life as a web developer significantly harder for many, many years. To say that i'm not a fan is putting it rather mildly...

[GrandFather]

Impressed is somewhat ambiguous. I'm impressed by Eclipse - the degree of dumbness that results in a dialog box prompt following a run resulting in a compile failure that asks "Continue anyway" with a checkbox that allows you to skip the dialog and always run on failure completely baffles me!

So yes, I'm impressed by Eclipse, but in a rather bad way. I keep thinking "maybe that feature makes sense for Java", but even then a lot of the design seems at least weird, for not straight out nasty.