[CLUE-Talk] Intriguing project

[Jeffery Cann]

On Wednesday 01 May 2002 08:14 pm, Timothy C. Klein wrote:
> * David Anselmi (anselmi at americanisp.net) wrote:
> And there you have the number one reason why I never end up using an
> IDE.  I have lots of time invested in getting quite efficient with the
> vi editor.  Too often, I end up stuck with a lame integrated editor, or
> poor integrate between vi/gvim and the IDE.  Sigh ...

I feel your pain... Short answer:  Yes -- planned for NetBeans 3.4 vim and 
EMACS emulation within the editor.

Long answer:

As a vi (actually vim now) lover, I agree totally.  I would much rather keep 
my hands on the keyboard and use vi commands than the mouse.  Of course, you 
could argue that your email editor should have a vi emulator, right?

I do think folks benefit a lot more from an IDE (especially NetBeans) because 
it has so many cool features (especially for Java development) that make it 
worthwhile to forget about vi movement commands.

For example:
+ JUnit integration - one click to generate unit classes
+ CVS integration - full CVS commands within the IDE
+ XML support - one click to validate your XML against a DTD or XSD
+ UML support - via Poseidon UML (open source) + commercial plugins

Sure, I can use command line utils or other GUI apps to accomplish those 
tasks, but what makes an IDE powerful for software development is the 
integration.  I don't have to leave the IDE.  This makes training of new 
developers much easier when they can stay in a single application, rather 
than opening 5 other applications.

NetBeans is particularly cool because it is open source _platform_.  This 
means that any Joe Schmoe can write a module for it.  In fact, two of the 
four modules (above) were developed by 3rd parties.  

It also is interesting that companies like Refactorit and Embarcadero have 
written commercial plugins for NetBeans.  Embarcadero is a UML design tool 
that features round-trip engineering.  Refactorit is a plugin that helps you 
refactor code - like change class names or method names.

At JavaOne last month, there were no less than 13 vendors that were selling 
NetBeans plugins.  This is a small taste of the power of a modular, open 
source IDE platform.

To answer Dave's question:

There *is* an effort to integrate vim as a drop-in replacement for the 
NetBeans IDE.  There is some information on the NetBeans.org web site.  Under 
the NetBeans 3.4 features (latest is 3.3), EMACS and Vim emulation are listed 
as "should have' features:

   http://editor.netbeans.org/doc/NewFeatures.html#2

Here is the home page for the 'external editors' NetBeans project:

  http://externaleditor.netbeans.org/

Not sure when / if it will happen because the code is 'pre-alpha'.  I would 
love to see it, but I still use NetBeans everyday without missing vim too 
much.

Jeff