re: real hackers use emacs

["BLuRry" <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

Mark McDougall wrote:
> BLuRry wrote:
>
> > But I will happily share my opinion
> > that modern IDE's like eclipse and netbeans are the way to go if you
> > want to hammer out 1500 lines of code in a couple of days.
>
> *Real* programmers don't write Java! ;)

They do if they don't want to spend the rest of their lives writing
configure scripts and hope that their code compiles on another
platform.  :-P

> Swipe at Java aside, I absolutely *HATE* Eclipse with a passion - and I'm
> not the only one.

Yeah, I hate Eclipse too.  It reeks of IBM code bloat.  I'm a big
Netbeans 5+ fan (and if you haven't used netbeans since the 3.x days,
it's grown up since then).  It's overall a lot more flexible and more
straight-forward.

Back to the Emacs bit -- and I'll try to be brief to avoid hijacking
the thread about the wonderful disk project...  :-)

The reason I dislike Emacs is same reason why people love it: The
keyboard shortcuts and the spartan user experience.  Emacs is so
overly-dependent on keyboard shortcuts, that you have to know all them
in order to use it efficently.  The anticipation of the invention of
the Mouse was that this new UI concept would make it more intiuitive to
the user to perform simple tasks by selecting text, clicking on it, and
selecting a relevant action.  It's not a new concept.  :-P  (watch "The
Demo" on google video)

Yet, in emacs you have no contextual relevance.  You can select text
for copy/paste only.  This doesn't go very far when the selected text
has meaningful significance -- e.g. the thing selected has a specific
relevance in the document (a method, a keyword, a section title, a
comment) -- Emacs has no facility to even care about these things, as
far as I can tell, beyond syntax hilighting.  You can't right-click on
something and get contextually-relevant actions for that thing.  There
is no concept of a context menu.  But you might be able to perform
context-related actions if you know the right control-key sequence.  To
me, that's user-hostile, not user-friendly.

Netbeans example: I want to rename a method that is used everywhere in
my project.  I can refactor a method by just right-clicking on it and
selecting Refactor>Rename (or by pressing alt-shit-R with the cursor
over the name) and it renames the method in the class itself and also
everywhere else that uses the method in my whole project, letting me
preview the changes in advance.  There's several more examples along
these lines.  I'm sure that there is some equivilant to this in the
C/C++ world in the form of (ick) eclipse or (gag) visual studio.  The
overall goal is to provide convience to the developer and eliminate
redundant work, for which I think modern IDE's are starting to do a
good job.