From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-08-28T02:06:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby does not nead an ide

David Vallner wrote:
> Just how often do you edit text files of insane sizes again? 
I do it all the time with Windows "GVim". It's faster for me to
right-click on a humongous CSV file, "Edit in Vim", type

:g/Loopback/d
:wq

than it is for me to open up a CygWin window and do the same thing with

grep -v Loopback file.csv > edited-file.csv; mv edited-file.csv file.csv

or, since the CSV file is going into an RDB, ask a colleague to change
the query to filter out the Loopback.

Changing the query is the correct *long-term* answer, but when someone
wants the answer contained in that CSV file now and not when that
colleague comes back from vacation, it gets done with GVim. As I said in
another post, muscle memory can be a hard taskmaster sometimes. :)

> And... To save and quit, vim is ESC : w g - five keypresses.

Well, usually I don't need the ESC, and SHIFT-Z-Z is about 2.5
keypresses by my way of thinking.

> For interested parties, I use neither side of that holy war. SciTE /
> gedit / kate depending on current operating system for simple things or
> in a pinch, nano / joe from a console for five-second config file
> touchup, Eclipse whenever I need a feature that's outside the scope of
> actually editing text and more the responsibility of a development tool.
> (3.2 working sets considered sexy.)

I installed Eclipse once and was literally amazed at all the stuff it
can do. I wonder about a tool that is much more complex than the
artifacts one uses it to build, though. :)

Emacs co-evolved with Lisp and is ideally suited to the needs of Lisp
and Scheme programmers. Vi/Vim co-evolved with UNIX/Linux command line
toolsets, as did Perl originally, so is ideally suited to editing
configuration files and doing things with a file that require a little
more thinking than a canned "grep/awk/sed" command string, but less
programming than a Perl script. Eclipse co-evolved with enterprise Java
programming, so it's ideally suited to the needs of those programmers.

FreeRide, Mondrian and RadRails are, AFAIK, intended specifically to
co-evolve with the needs of Ruby/Rails programmers. Rubyists who use
other editors are probably stuck, as I am, in muscle memory. :)