Fight Night
Guest poster brian d foy writes:
YAPC::NA is hosting a deathmatch that will finally settle the editor question, do you settle for vim or emacs when you are stubborn enough to not use something good. The advocates of either side are sure to point to the many ways they are able to modify their editor (probably using something that most people will agree is even uglier than Perl) so they can use weird, private incantations to do things that only work on their local system. You might notice these people wasting half a day setting up their inferior editor when they get a new system, or being unable to follow what they are doing in their primitive editors during their presentations.
If you’re using one of these abysmally lacking editors, what have you done to make it useful to you? What aliases and commands have you set up? Which ones do you use most frequently? Did you get these modifications in secret meetings in dark alleys away from the eyes of respectable society? Did you download dubious files from sketchy websites that you find on Reddit? How many editor diseases you have caught?
If you are using a good editor, you can still participate by showing the luddites how easily you accomplish simple tasks. Or, you can tell the troglodytes just how unevolved they are. Remember, though, to hate the sin but love the sinner. The YAPC::NA Code of Conduct wants to make the conference a safe place, even if an attendee has an unfortunate choice of editor.
No matter how sophisticated or modern you are, post a picture of your editor setup and link to this post. We want to see what colors, sizes, and fonts that you use. Do you like light on dark, dark on light, light on transparent light? Do you have a background picture or a solid background? Do you want to make your editor look like the old dumb terminals or have all the flash of the Las Vegas strip at night?
[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]
My little part in the greater Perl world.
I use GViM because Padre cannot do a split window, that is, show two files (or the same one twice) in the window at the same time. Otherwise I would switch.
I have a lot of customizations for GViM but these are my favourites:
map <C-Down> <C-E>
map <C-Up> <C-Y>
map <S-C-Down> <Down><C-E>
map <S-C-Up> <Up><C-Y>
The first two map ctrl-up-arrow and ctrl-down-arrow move the viewport up and down without moving the cursor. This allows you to position the cursor where you want it with respect to the window.
The second two, ctrl-shift-up-arrow and ctrl-shift-down-arrow move the cursor and the viewport, effectively keep the cursor in the same place in the window while the file scrolls past.
What counts as "something good?"
It was actually a joke post, trying to rile some ire. Vim is a perfectly good editor, as is Emacs. However, for the next generation of Perl most people are using a visual IDE like Komodo and more recently Padre.
How many developers actually use that stuff? (Or "the next generation of Perl," whatever that is?) I doubt it's "most people."
I laughed.
I think it could be fun watching a bunch of editor-loving programmers talk about what they like best and figuring out how to share cool idea. So, great!
I have a hard time believing that "most people" are using GUI IDEs for their Perl development. Or, rather, I have a hard time believing that we have any real data on what editors people use or any means to make a strong claim.
The Perl Survey put emacs + vi-likes around 65% of the primary editors in use, with Padre + Komodo getting around 2.5%. I don't think the Perl Survey is a strong measure of all Perl developers, but I'd want to see something else cited to suggest that emacs and vi are being left in the dust.
If you re-read you'll note that I didn't say "most people" are using visual IDEs. I said of the next gen crowd most are using visual IDEs.
The reason for this is very simple: The people teaching Perl, like Gabor Szabo, are teaching using visual IDEs. When brian d foy teaches, if the student has an editor preference, then they use it, but otherwise he teaches with a visual text editor too; this is what he'll be doing at YAPC::NA. Otherwise he not only has to teach the user Perl, but he has to teach them Vim or Emacs keyboard commands as well.
You and I are of the older generation, people like us use the same old editors we've always used in most situations. If we want to attract new people to Perl one of the ways to do that is to show that we have modern professional IDEs just like the other languages that we're competing against. After all, if you were a young developer learning a language for the first time, and one had a big shiny IDE and the other didn't, which do you think you'd choose? You want the one that will help you do more faster, because you don't yet know the merits of the language, so you have to judge on the tools you see first: the editor.
Everyone should be posting their comments on the YAPC blog. The point of this obvious troll is to get you to interact at http://blog.yapcna.org/. :)
vi is short for visual, therefore vi _is_ a "visual" IDE. ;) Besides, these days people use GViM, which is a far cry from vi.
Hi Folks
I don't worry about what other people are using, just about how I'm managing. This is under Debian.
Every 12 months or so I give Padre another chance, but still find it a bit painful/awkward and buggy. Check the bug reports. I can't give you my latest submissions on that because I simply don't care any more.
I have used Emacs for several years, every now and then switching to UltraEdit. A month ago I switched to UE one more time, and just love the directory navigation feature alone, since it can be purely mouse based. And yes, other editors may offer that - not interested.
As for customization.... Hmmm - these days I just want the thing to work, and out of the box UE works just as I want. Case closed. YMMV.