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Old 02-26-2010, 06:40 PM  
BestXXXPorn
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Originally Posted by brandonstills View Post
I use vi quite frequently. Vi has code completion just like an IDE has as well. Most people don't know about it though. I used GUI's before vi, I just found vi easier to work with once I went through the learning curve. Of course I also type on a dvorak keyboard for most English based text (emails and IM) ;)

Once you master vi you can get things done so much faster. The problem is it can take you a week to get to the proficiency level of notepad and another month before you start seeing any real benefit to using it. A lot of GUI's force you to switch between keyboard and mouse. I keep my hand on the keyboard the entire time and don't even move my hand to the arrow keys. Moving your hand from home row to the arrows takes away from thinking power.

vi doesn't really make you productive until you can edit code without using the arrow keys (h,j,k,l) and can jump around the file. In a GUI you would have to click at the spot or you'd have to hold down the key until you get to the correct cursor position. When you get good at vi you can literally jump to where you want in fractions of a second (even if it is 40 lines down and 8 tokens in).

Still GUI's have their uses. They are good if you need to jump between multiple files and be taken right to the function. Of course, vi does this a well but I haven't spent the time to learn that part of it yet.

I also use TextMate, Emacs (when working in interactive REPL-based languages), and occasionally GUI's. It all depends on the task and what I need to do at that moment. If I need a lot of keyboard macro's I'll use textmate. If I need to just do general coding or quick one off repetitions I'll use vi. If I need to jump around code a lot from file to file I'll use a GUI. It's all about the right tool at the right time. I'll edit the same file in multiple editors sometimes.
I used to be more like that until I started using UltraEdit... There's so much functionality packed into that thing that it's hard to stop using it once you've adopted it. The additions over just an editor are fantastic... Just starting from simple things like projects, being able to grep within a project, and switching projects easily to more advanced stuff like setting up macros for git or svn commands, piping script output back into a new file, opening files from ftp and having the event save a local backup copy, hotkeys to launch external apps and scripts, etc...

Once you start integrating all of that into your routine it becomes so nice to have it all available to you in single application. I see you wrote TextMate so I'm guessing you're an os x guy. I believe UltraEdit is coming out with an OS X version very soon. Another thing that's so fantastic about UltraEdit is their development speed. They're releasing version 16 and they do about 3 - 5 minor revisions inbetween majors. They just keep making additions... Don't even get me started on the lack of updates for TextMate ;)
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Last edited by BestXXXPorn; 02-26-2010 at 06:41 PM..
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