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Being a tool-guy

Heck, I like my tools. I like my pencil, the hammer, my planer, Python, PSPad and I liked to develop Java-apps with Eclipse at university.

In programming naked I already mentioned The IDE Divide by OliverSteele. In that article Mr. Steele talks about two kinds of hackers: (1) the ones that hack in a text-editor and (2) the other fraction that hacks in an IDE. I am rather clearly in that latter camp knowing keyboard-shortcuts most people don’t know existed and soon customizing things so that they better fit me and my way of doing things. Eclipse is a very fine IDE for such kind of people. I know. I had to switch to VisualStudio for my new job. I especially miss Eclipse’s ReFactoring-features. Moving code around, increasing (hopefully) the quality of SoftwareArchitecture and beautifying code is one of my favorite pastimes. :-)

Lucky me the first larger task at my new job was exactly that: ReFactoring code, making the distinction between GUI and business-layer more explicit. But: I had to do it with VisualStudio 2003 (VS). And: VS feels (to me) like a heavy text-editor with a huge archive of contextual help and lots of bugs. Refactoring has to be done via Search&Replace. Often one (at least me) has to restart VS because something stopped working. How I miss heavenly Eclipse.

Therefore I soon began looking for some plugin that would turn VS into something more useful. I found ReSharper. With ReSharper navigating code is much more comfortable and it has some nice features for refactoring code. It helps a lot. I am currently learning other, really interesting, features of VS, e.g. the possibility to visuall edit forms with the designer™. But still: to me VS feels just clumsy for everyday tasks.

The other thing is SourceSafe. I don’t like it. I cannot work lightly with things I don’t like. The tools I use have to have the right feel to them. I like Subversion better. It feels more elegant. And EleganceMatters

I said I am an IDE-guy. On the other hand I like to hack Python with a text-editor (my favorite is PSPad – but is this still a text-editor?). Maybe that’s due to the still small number of IDEs for Python. That’s another point Mr. Steel mentions in his article: If one wants to be on the edge (using the latest in language development), one cannot wait for tools.

I’ve collected some links to PythonIDEs. PyDev, a plugin for Eclipse, seems very interesting. I have not tried it yet, though.

May you always have the right tools at your hand.

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