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From: Anthony R. <an...@gm...> - 2006-02-16 10:00:42
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Hi Gene, > I've been a jEdit user for quite a while now. I used jEdit for Java dev > for a couple of years. But, eventually the tide took me over and I > switched to IDEA. I'm still not happy. > ... > For example, Incremental Search in jEdit - Awesome! Incremental Search > in IDEA (v4.5) sucks - don't update find again, so there's no way to > repeat the search. > > Is there a better IDE for jEdit users? Is there a set of plug-ins now > that will work well (in Linux) and will allow me to work solely that > way? Is Eclipse the answer? I'd say no. Eclipse has the same issues as IDEA by the sounds of it. I have to use Eclipse at work as the build process is tied into it, and for most Java tasks it is great - superb refactoring, debugging, compile errors as you type, reference searching, code tracking, CVS integration, JUnit integration, JBoss integration .... However, as far as powerful editing goes, Eclipse also sucks. Crap editing power - same incremental search issues as IDEA, no block editing, no scriptability (certainly nothing like as powerful as jEdits beanshell macros), no middle-click quick paste. Not even drag and drop for christ sake!! It also ties you into it's build process by default - things don't go as smoothly if you try to break out of this process. And it is hard to edit files which aren't in one of your current projects. So I tend to have both open, and copy and paste into jEdit for power editing, and back again once I've finished. > I have a hard time believing that developers don't want powerful > editing. If none of the front-runner ide's can excel in the essentials, In my experience, they're not that bothered. I guess it's a case of jEdit's power spoiling us for other more basic editors. > perhaps it is time for us to join together and make jEdit contender > IDE. (I just stepped out of my knowledge confort zone.) There seem to be plugins out there for almost all of the things that Eclipse can do, but the nature of the development effort on jEdit plugins is that they are almost all individually developed by single (or small groups of) developers in their spare time, on features that they need at the time. For my own part, I have developed three plugins, none of which I have time or necessity to develop any more, and so they have sat stagnant for 7 months or so. IDE's like Eclipse have a huge amount of resource poured into them by the big guns like IBM - jEdit just can't compete in terms of IDE functionality on a purely volunteer basis. It needs someone with the time to pull a subset of the better plugins together, and make them more tightly integrated, and easier to configure (usable with no configuration would be the ideal). I can't see that I'll be using anything other than the two in parallel for the foreseeable future... -- Ant... |