IDE? We don’t need no stinking IDE!
After a few weeks of moving back to a Mac, I can honestly say that I am far more productive that I ever was on a PC. The really ironic thing? I’m not using an IDE. While I have Eclipse installed, I didn’t go beyond that and I haven’t honestly opened Eclipse in over two weeks.
The Secret?
Well, the company I work for had an extra license for TextMate and I grabbed it. I’ve never used it before but I have always heard such good things about it and decided to give it a whirl. In the past I’ve been a diehard JEdit fan. JEdit has the best code folding hands down, and a wonderful array of plugins.
However, I have to admit that TextMate has pretty much won me over. Dare I say that I enjoy writing code now? I never thought an editor would make writing code actually enjoyable in and of itself, but this is about as close as I have come to finding such a thing. Combined with the tabbed terminal in OS X 10.5, I have almost everything I need to write my code quickly and run my tests.
Say It Isn’t So!
The key to being productive? Very little mouse usage. While I have yet to master all TextMate’s key combos, I know enough to be fairly quick at it. Yes, yes, IntelliJ and Eclipse both have a wide array of keyboard assignments, but for some reason it just isn’t the same. Maybe it’s mental, who knows.
The single biggest feature that I use is the CMD-T, which brings up the open file dialog that allows you to search for a file just by typing in it’s name. This saves tons of time as you aren’t hunting around a traditional file open dialog. IntelliJ has a similar feature but it has two different key combos depending on the file type. Yuck. I believe Eclipse has something similar as well. Neither one is as seemless or quick as TextMate’s though.
The One Big Drawback
If there is one thing that I miss the most about a full IDE is code completion. With a language as API heavy as Java is, code completion is almost a must. So far I’ve been getting by pretty good, but I do miss it from time to time.
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Comments
Code completion is the main feature I couldn’t do without - besides debugging, auto compile (poor Netbeans users) and many other things.
BTW in Eclipse it’s CTRL-SHIFT-T (or CTRL-SHIFT-R for any resource).
The main things I use IntelliJ for are the code analysis. I have over 200 inspections I use as many of these have quick fixes and speed up editing. IntelliJ allows you to refactor code as you are typing it (even if the code has many compilation errors) I use his feature constantly.
You can also redefine you key mapping and have multiple key mapping you can switch between.
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