We have developed some quick and good tools on this platform and it seems to work out neatly on our overall structure.
Unfortunately, NetBeans was in the middle of an internal transition at the time (having to do with how actions are bound to keys and menu items), and I didn't get the newer way, and the module I expanded used the old keybinding method.
The Netbeans rewrite that followed, the use of Ant and Maven as project files and the overall plugin quality beats Eclipse any day.
The HTML5 support is great, specially the integration with JavaScript frameworks and static analyzers.
I also enjoy the C++ and Assembly support is also quite good, given it is the official Solaris IDE.
Best of all, no nonsense workspace or perspective modes in sight.
And the plugins API is quite good.
This is what I want most from a Java IDE. I find IDEs project configuration complex, arbitrary, inscrutable, and un-diffable (making version control on the project files mostly useless).
Eclipse and IntelliJ make some effort to work with Maven and Ant, but tend to get out of sync in hard to debug ways.
Perhaps things have improved since then, but I remember NetBeans to be awfully buggy, eg. it could make it look as if files were saved whereas, uhm, they weren't, because of which once it got close to being banned in the company that I worked at.
That's this bug I believe: https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=206513
(Note how prompty and efficiently resolved it was)
You can see individual changes, see history of a file, revert back lines, see what happened upon every save, not just every commit. I use it for Ruby on Rails. This, and the find (grep) feature is the only feature that I use. None of the other bells or whistles.
I've been working on plugin for Geany that approaches this, but nothing has matched it for Netbeans.
Six reasons to use Emacs
Emacs is a great IDE for octopuses and Lisp developers, but did you also know you can use it for almost every other project? Here are 6 reasons why you should use Emacs for your projects.
Emacs is at the top of a one-element list when it comes to great free Lisp IDEs. But for a little over three years now I have been using it in more and more projects. Going from basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript to Erlang, PHP, C++ and programming ARM microcontrollers. You name it, Emacs can handle it.
It is true, that Emacs was conceived initially for developing primarily with Lisp and various forms of stuff barely more convenient than pure assembly. But now that it is in its 24.4 version, it has grown to cover much more ground, from languages - as I mentioned above - to frameworks like Angular.js, Node.js, Symfony, Zend, etc…
So here are 6 reasons to use Emacs:
6 - Emacs is uber-modular
Unlike Eclipse, Netbeans, or most others, Emacs is a really modular IDE. And this is great for both users and developers. After downloading Emacs you can choose between different packages, modules and extensions depending on your needs, If you only need C/C++ projects you won’t be downloading unnecessary packages for Java or PHP. You can install, tweak and remove packages depending on your needs, making Emacs a highly customizable IDE with little effort.
Plus, if you’re a developer, you can make Emacs do whatever you like by modifying running code on the fly. If a feature you want is missing, you can trivially code it up in few seconds and enable immediately, all without restarting Emacs. You can browse through the fully-documented elisp sources to study how the power of Lisp and right design decision can allow various modules augment other modules without conflict…
Emacs also can have a Nyan Cat in a modeline.
This can be very instructive.
5 - A great community
Like all great open-source projects, Emacs has a very active online community. I rarely stumble on an issue that was not already solved somewhere on the Emacs wiki. This is particularly helpful when you’re discovering a new IDE. Also the Emacs Rocks videos. Those are great too. You can also participate in the community using IRC. Emacs has a built-in IRC client, of course.
4 - Org Mode
Trying to organize your work? Emacs has some great text-oriented tools to suit your needs. It will happily turn your simple plaintext list of tasks into full-blown calendaring system, complete with clocking the time you spent on tasks, pomodoro mode (optionally installed in org-pomodoro package), generating agendas for whatever timespan and set of conditions you want, and many more; all of this with a very nice workflow and possibly the most convenient tool for editing tables on the planet.
3 - Teamwork
Working on a team or alone I like to use version control (Git mostly) to manage my work. Emacs offer a great support for this (Git, Mercurial and SVN; and Darcs, and Fossil, and even TFS, you name it). You can manage branches, commits, pushes and conflicts effortlessly and without having to touch a mouse or leave your editor. No other IDE has perfected this, out-of-the-box, like Emacs (though you might want to install magit package).
2 - Browser REPLs
Read-Eval-Print-Loops are awesome, as any Lisp-speaking SLIME-using programmer will tell you. Emacs has numerous REPLs that connect to browsers to make your life easier. Their main features are: Refresh on Save (ok, you'll probably have to type it up yourself, but it's a single defadvice...), bi-directional element inspection, JavaScript debugging, HTML debugging and pushing to browser, CSS debugging and pushing to browser, etc…
If you’re an experienced web developer you’d say “I can set those up myself with some scripts and extensions”. And you’re correct. The thing is, it's simpler than it sounds. Emacs offers you all this with a bunch of simple M-x package-install invocations.
1 - Feature rich
I have been using Emacs for a while now, and every other day I discover new things; and even if I discover a new thing in another IDE, the Lispiness of Emacs never ceases to amaze me - like with all Lisps, it's trivial to copy a feature from a competitor and do it better. That is, if you don't already have a better one.
Note: I always keep something like vim installed for quick editing, most of the time because I'm too lazy to set up emacs-client as EDITOR for rare random interactions with interactive editing in unix shell.
Are you using Emacs or another powerful editor? Share your experience in a comment!
- Graphics tooling.
- GUI designer
- Semantic refactoring
- Graphic visualization of CSS modes
- Integration of JavaScript frameworks with code-completion support and two way editing between CSS, HTML and JavaScript code
- Graphical visualization of data structures in debugger
- Graphical support of heap data and threads in debugger
- ...
- GUI designer - not really, but you're likely to be using a framework-specific GUI builder anyway. Then again, if you really wanted it, you could probably twist the artist-mode hard enough to draw mockups in it and save them as XML descriptions.
- Semantic refactoring - CEDET.
- Graphic visualization of CSS modes - Rainbow Mode, or just open a frikkin' browser.
- Integration of JavaScript frameworks with code-completion support and two way editing between CSS, HTML and JavaScript code - not sure what you mean by "two-way editing" here, but you have code completion, CSS/HTML/JS support, and - as I mentioned - a way to push all of this back and forth between Emacs and a browser.
- Graphical visualization of data structures in debugger - depending on how complex you want to be, but for most practical uses the answer is "yes, Emacs handles it"
- Graphical support of heap data and threads in debugger - again, if by "graphical support" you mean trees, not bubble-graphs and pretty pictures, then yes
- ... - type it up, M-x eval buffer, and carry on.
Considering the number of plugins that exist for Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans, the claim that emacs is more modular than all these IDE's is a bit absurd, don't you think?
> Like all great open-source projects, Emacs has a very active online community.
As do Eclipse and IDEA (NetBeans being a distant third, not so much).
> Working on a team or alone I like to use version control (Git mostly) to manage my work.
All the IDE's have git (and other revision systems) plugins. They all have their pros and cons and personally, I prefer to use an external tool (SourceTree) but emacs is unlikely to have an obvious advantage here.
> 2 - Browser REPLs
The Lisp eval mode and shell interaction are nice, but they are pretty limited to elisp and shell. All the IDE's have evaluation windows that let you run any arbitrary Java code, something that doesn't exist in emacs.
> 1 - Feature rich
Well, yes, all these tools have a lot of features.
It's interesting that you don't list the number one (and pretty much only) advantage that emacs has over any other text editor: macros. Macros are pretty much the only reason why I still use emacs today (\C-x(, \C-x) and \C-xe). And occasionally for small text files.
But for code, if you're not using a specialized IDE, you're not as productive as you could be.
Modularity is not measured in how many plugins you can have, but in what those plugins can do with your editor without stepping on each other's toes.
All your other criticism applies to the original text as much as to my comedy piece.
> The Lisp eval mode and shell interaction are nice, but they are pretty limited to elisp and shell.
No; go and check it out. I specifically wrote about browser REPLs. People wrote REPLs that connect to the browser and let you execute arbitrary JavaScript, as well as transfer HTML and CSS between Emacs and an open page. Check out Moz Repl and skewer-mode.
> All the IDE's have evaluation windows that let you run any arbitrary Java code, something that doesn't exist in emacs.
Well Emacs has it too. Just install a Java REPL. Or shell out from inside Emacs, like all the IDEs used to do.
> It's interesting that you don't list the number one (and pretty much only) advantage that emacs has over any other text editor: macros. Macros are pretty much the only reason why I still use emacs today (\C-x(, \C-x) and \C-xe).
Well, I don't find macros that important alone. Their power depends on having complex text selection, navigation and modification tools. Things like reverse incremental search (regexp or regexp-free version, whatever you like), skipping and selecting semantic units (sentences, paragraphs, s-expressions, etc.), expand-region, transposing, sorting, rectangle-operations, etc. And then there are things like ace-jump, multiple-cursors, etc.
The power and convenience of Emacs lies in all those features being readily available everywhere, one key press away. Emacs is a "total greater than sum of its parts" type of editor.
Is modularity measured by plugin count alone? Or is it measured by something like how feasible it is to remove some of the core IDE logic and replace it with your own choice of logic?
1 - I need a good Editor, not an IDE
OK, how can I replace its shitty editor with something decent, like Vim or Emacs?
> 3- Teamwork
I don't see how clicky menu would help with issuing git commands apart from few obvious entries. I would end up needing terminal anyway.
> 1- Feature rich
So is AutoCAD, but this alone doesn't make it good environment for developing code.
http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/2802/jvi-vi-vim-editor-cl...
NetBeans' editor is shitty not because it's not vi-like, but because it lacks plenty of editing functions fully featured Vim has.
