From: Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT <jupp@...>
Date: 2005-12-21T04:03:13+09:00
Subject: Unix is not an *I*DE (Was: Any TextMate Editor equivelent for Windows ?)

Hi!

At Tue, 20 Dec 2005 05:20:40 +0900, Chad Perrin wrote:
> I always just kinda figured that Linux *is* my IDE.

To quote Sting's famous song "Russians": I don's subscribe to this
point of view.

Please recall that IDE means 'integrated development environment'.
Many attributes apply to Unix as an environment but 'integrated'
definitely is not among them.

Let me illustrate this with an example that sometimes make me hack my
keyboard instead of hacking *on* it:

For searching forward for some string you may need to use Ctrl-F,
Ctrl-S or '/' depending on which program you are currently using
(shell, editor, debugger). Integration on the other hand would require
that the same operation is always bound to the same keystroke.

The Emacs operating system and the vim editor are much closer to an
IDE than Unix.

To give an example: In Emacs in order to open a file in the editor you
use 'find-file' and provide a file name. In order to open a directory
in dired-mode you use the same 'find-file' command.

Some vim users may be surprised but vim actually has a similar
feature. If you enter "vim ." vim will list all files in the current
directory, will allow to change to subdirectories, and opens a file if
you select one - a true vi does not have this feature.

I used to do almost anything with vim but now I uses escape, meta,
alt, Ctrl, Shift (Emacs for short) most of the time. To put it this
way: Emacs is a mega swiss army knife. It is not very handy but it is
one single tool that can be used for anything - it even can cook
coffee(*).

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt

(*) Well, sort of. I personally use a manually operated coffee mill, a
    water cooker and a Brazilian style coffee machine to cook my
    coffee - this method is not yet supported by Emacs. It requires an
    RFC-compliant coffee machine (such an RFC exists indeed ;-).