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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