Joerg Plewe's Blog: Community: Java Tools Archives

Posted by herkules on January 28, 2007 at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The NetBeans source code editor is not known the be the ultimate one these days. From what I heard and saw, IDEA seems to be #1 in this respect today. But sometimes even small things have big effects and make work more enjoyable. Sandip Chitale created a set of linetools as a NetBeans module that nobody should miss. It gives a liteweight way to work with lines. It's very easy to move lines around or duplicate them (and then move around). The same works with multiline selections. Very handy, for it avoids prior selection of text in many cases.

Working with that reminded me of an editor feature I created in the glorious times when I was allowed to work in the Forth programming language (my all-time favorite).

Those days I had a line- and a character stack. A single keystroke allowed to swallow or copy lines or characters to the stack and spit them out at another place. This was one of the features you'll never miss again once getting used to it. Much better than the common cut/copy/paste based on selections.

Sandip, please, can you help me (again)?

NetBeans, Eclipse, IDEA ... pah! VS2003!

Posted by herkules on May 16, 2006 at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There are many discussions around: which is the best IDE?
From my current point of view: take any of these and be happy! Really.

When still working in the Java area, I was used to NetBeans. Many of my collegues used Eclipse, the rich ones used IDEA. Of course, we flamed and discussed a lot about it. IDE is religion.

Nowadays, I have to work with C#/C++ on .NET1.1. The tool of choice: Visual Studio 2003.

What a contrast!

Although I worked with Visual Studio for years in the past and felt quite comfortable with it - today I miss everything! Visual Studio is Notepad.exe plus some small extra features. But most of the features we got used to and that make our daily work so enjoyable are missing:

no usable code completion worth mentioning
no suggestions about exception handling, redundant using or namespace qualifiers, types,...
no good VCS integration (beside good'ol SourceSafe, which is not used here)
no refactorings
no 'where used'
no unit testcase generation (TestDriven helps a bit)
no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)

It feels like being kicked back to stoneage. Not even talking about these ugly, cluttered toolbars, these always-too-small, not resizable dialogs,...

Conclusion: if you can use any of the leading Java IDEs, be happy with it. Really happy. Know that you are far ahead us poor VS guys.

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