It's been more than an year that i'm developing a new scripting language with its own grammar rules and constructs.
I'd like to give the users of this language some minimalistic ide to work with, but i don't want/have time to make one from scratch so i'd like to take one already existing (it has to run on Linux platforms natively, so no windows-only editors plz) and customize it.
Well, which one is the easiest to customize without changing the source code and recompiling it, maybe even with plugin support?
Thank you.
UPDATE
I don't need to know which editor is the best for you, i need to know which one is the easiest to customize AND, most of it, which one has the most complete documentation about new language customization.
Ex: SciTE is good, but its documentation about custom grammars is really poor.
Have you looked into Scintilla/SciTE? I think it gets used often for this sort of thing. It's very lightweight, but from what I understand, is easy to add functionality to. It's not really an IDE, but it's more of a text-editor component that you could use as the basis for a simple IDE. I've used SciTE, which is a sort of demo text editor of Scintilla's capabilities. It's simple, but also quite fast and responsive.
I suppose another option would be to write plugins for existing IDEs such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Both of these IDEs support many languages just through 3rd-party plugins. Going this route means you don't need to build a complete UI, just the components needed to make your language work.
The downside of building plugins for an extendable IDE (such as NetBeans or Eclipse) is that you are at the mercy of the IDE developers. If they change the way the platform works, you must ensure that your plugins still work with the new versions. Sometimes this can become a major problem.
All of these options should work on Linux as well as Windows.
This sounds like a very ambitious project and I wish you luck.
I don't use linux too often, I use a Mac and my favorite text editor is called TextMate because it has snippets, code completion, and a whole mess of other features. The closest thing to it that I've found on linux is called Scribes.
There's always Emacs or Vim (I lean towards Vim, but that's just my opinion :) ). Neither are IDEs per se, but both are very extensible and it shouldn't be too hard to create settings for each that will aid people writing scripts in your language.
I know this is an exact duplicate, but a year has gone by and Scala seems to be a fast moving thing, so I figure it might be acceptable to ask again:
What is the best IDE for Scala development right now?
I know the Eclipse plugin is a work in progress and undergoing a complete re-write for Scala 2.8 but I saw a colleague use a nightly-build recently and it was extremely poor.
I use IntelliJ IDEA (the Community Edition 9 is free) and the scala plugin for it is really good. Excellent syntax highlighting, code navigation etc. It's not as good as the Java support but then I wouldn't necessarily expect that. It's good enough that I feel I'm more productive than I would have been in Java!
It has Specs integration and console integration as well.
I tried both Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA,
Eclipse is the worst in my opinion. It is slow, sometimes messes up the syntax highlighting, almost always messes up the autocompletion and the whole IDE gets unresponsive from time to time. I would not recommend it for any kind of use except for self torturing.
NetBeans works better than the Eclipse plugin. Better highlighting, much better autocompletion but it has been reporting errors on a fairly complex syntax all over the source. But when i hit run, the code compiles just well. Could not understand why. Another issue is that autocomplete can not suggest private members of classes when you are writing inside the body of that class. Poor!
IntelliJ IDEA works just fine. I recommend that if you are seriously leaning against Scala development.
I hope that the Eclipse plugin will be more mature in time but given that it had plenty of time to become mature, I'm not a big fan of the idea. Scala has a great potential, being a well thought, programmer friendly language and running on JVM (which means great performance and high availability) but the poor IDE support is the worst thing for such language. Writing PHP on a simple text editor is acceptable but Scala, with such complex syntax and requirement to use the bloated Java libraries, there is a need of assistance. Maybe the current Scala community with functinal and Java background can not understand this but you can not expect newcomers to easily adopt to such a language instantly.
Anyway, go for IntelliJ IDEA...
Your main options are a fully fledged IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans or Eclipse, or a text editor with some Scala awareness like TextMate or Emacs.
Personally, I like IntelliJ the best. I've been using it for Java development for many years, especially due to its refactoring and code navigation power. The Scala plugin was quite rough to start with, but is improving constantly. It's open source, I've been contributing bug reports and a few bug fixes.
The IDE plugins have all been working hard to be ready for Scala 2.8. It's been a moving target during the last 6 months, especially given that binary compatibility was broken as new features were added. So you might update to a new build of the compiler and then wait for supporting libraries (e.g. specs, scalatest) to be updated and recompiled.
Now that the Scala 2.8 Beta is imminent these problems are less frequent.
IntelliJ implements its own parser and type inference, as it does for Java. This lets it be more tolerant of errors and to immediately understand your code as you are editing. The type inference is not complete yet. Eclipse delegates most of this work to scalac, which means it they should always agree, but the information is only regenerated when you save files and the compiler is re-run. I don't know how NetBeans works in this regard.
Right now, IntelliJ's IDEA. And one big difference from now to a year ago is that a free, open source version of IDEA is available.
Personally, I use IDEA CE 9.0.1, but leave compilation&testing to SBT, which I keep running on another window, with cc or ~test.
In the context of 2.8, I have used Eclipse 3.5.x with the nightly plug-in and IDEA Community Edition 9.0. IDEA has been clearly better for me, except for compilation times. But I use sbt in parallel and it takes care of that.
My main issues with the Eclipse plug-in are:
Inability to change my tab settings in Eclipse (though that seems to work for others)
Code compiles but some errors are still highlighted and I need to close and reopen the file
Auto-completion just returns a lot of choices
I did not have those issues in IDEA 9.0 build #IC-93.13 with the recent plug-in 0.3.385. Additionally IDEA shows me unused import statements.
All plug-ins seem to be evolving quite quickly and are actively developed and I suspect that what is true today may not be in one month. I hope that in a few months from now, we will just be able to use our favorite IDE and have good Scala support.
(note this is a repost of my recent answer to the original question)
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I am just starting at a job in which I will be using a lot of ColdFusion. What is the best IDE/Editor to use?
I'd like to provide my personal reasoning behind why you might choose any of these editors (at least the ones I'm familiar with). Just saying "use this, use that" is not at all helpful. To large degree, the question is wrong. There's rarely a "best IDE" for a language; rather, there are multiple environments, each suiting particular needs. Here goes:
1) Dreamweaver
Why you would use it: its history as a designer tool makes it much easier for "non-coder" types to start cranking out websites. If you're a solo developer building a lot of "Tom's Corner Store" type of sites, even if they require some CF Coding (mailing list, subscribers, current specials, light content management, etc), its design tools, "template" features, and ease-of-deployment (ftp) make it an attractive choice. It has good-enough code coloring and code completion for the built-in CF tags and functions. It can interrogate user-defined functions in the same page. It has excellent CSS support. You can find a wealth of extensions, too. It's pretty stable and, in my experience, hasn't been very "crashy". It will do a fair amount of code generation for you as well (whether that code is "good" is debatable). All in all Dreamweaver is incredible software for web site designers.
Why you wouldn't use it: It is not free, and it is certainly not a "coder's editor". While it provides for extensions, they're typically interface-focused (javascript validation, etc), unlike say Eclipse plugins, which can run the gamut. For large projects, it simply does not have the code navigation features that many coders come to expect. It's web-focused. So if you're a polyglot, or even just like to dabble in compiled languages (java, etc), then you'll need to keep another editor on hand for those tasks.... you won't be able to do it all in one place. ColdFusion unit testing support is nonexistent in Dreamweaver. There is no step debugging for ColdFusion.
2) CFEclipse plugged into Eclipse.
Why you'd use it: CFEclipse is going on 6 years old now and has matured significantly. It's been quite stable for the last few years and most crashiness has been due to Eclipse itself and not CFEclipse (which was not true in the early days). Recently CFEclipse has seen an infusion of fresh blood and features are being added to make coding in it even more productive. It contains a wealth of keyboard shortcuts, many of the toolbar features people love from ColdFusion Studio days, and Eclipse's in-built code navigation features (namely, Ctrl-Shift-R for finding files quickly).
It has content assist for native CF Tags and functions, and some support for in-page variables, though that's never worked all that well. It does not support in-page functions, nor does it provide native true component insight (i.e. insight into components that you write and use in other code). It will support component insight to some extent with Dictionaries, but even then, it requires a lot of work on the part of the dictionary creator. Most people find dictionaries too much work to maintain, in my experience.
The lastest version of CFEclipse contains the best CFML formatting you'll find.
For me, "method explorer" and "Snip Tree View" -- particularly keyboard shortcuts for inserting snippets -- have been big productivity boosters.
If you work with ColdSpring, ModelGlue, Mach-II, ColdBox, and other frameworks with xml configuration files, CFEclipse's Framework Explorer is brilliant.
Because it's a plugin to Eclipse, you can do everything else you'd want to do in Eclipse. You wanna code java? You can. You want webservice support? you got that. You want to do step debugging, you can do so with the free Adobe-provided extensions for Eclipse.
The large plugin ecosystem is one of the most attractive features of Eclipse, and you shouldn't discount this when deciding on an editor. For example, I would not want to work without Mylyn, which integrates with issue tracking and in my experience has transformed the way I work, much for the better.
Eclipse's version control system support is excellent as well. Subversion is well supported; there's a VSS plugin; and recently a git plugin (if not two) has been accepted into the Eclipse foundation so we'll see native git support very soon (you can get it now with a plugin).
Eclipse's ANT support is excellent.
You can easily plug the MXUnit Eclipse plugin into Eclipse for unit testing your CFML (full disclosure: I contribute to MXUnit).
Finally, I have full confidence that the folks working on CFEclipse -- Denny, Mark, Jim, Peter, et al. -- will continue to work toward keeping CFEclipse as the best open source CFML IDE available. These are some of the brightest minds in the ColdFusion community and are passionate about their mission. If you choose to use CFEclipse, you are not choosing to use an IDE that will be supplanted by ColdFusion Builder. This project is in good hands.
Why you wouldn't use it: it's a code IDE, not a design tool like Dreamweaver. It's not perfect... code assist can be too aggressive in its suggestions. Eclipse itself, especially when you pile it up with all kinds of plugins, can get unstable on lesser machines. Finally, people who don't like the "Project" view of the world often have complaints about it because they're used to working directly with the file system view of the world. Its deployment support is nowhere near as simple as Dreamweaver, though you can find plugins that get close.
3) ColdFusion Builder
Why you'd use it: all of what I said previously about Eclipse itself applies to CFBuilder when used as a plugin to Eclipse. I cannot speak to the Standalone version because as of this writing, it still doesn't support plugins very well. This will most surely be fixed by the time it is released, but I don't want to speculate on what the Standalone may or may not do.
One of CFBuilder's big draws is "Extensions". These are a way to plug in CFML code into your editor. It's hard to describe, so I'd suggest googling for "ColdFusion Builder Extensions", and you'll most likely be amazed. Adobe's Terry Ryan has created "Apptacular" for scaffolding applications from a database, and Brian Rinaldi has a series of posts on building CFBuilder extensions. These are huge and will prove themselves to be a developer's best friend after CFBuilder is released.
CFBuilder's deployment support is, in my opinion, on par with if not superior to Dreamweaver's.
CFBuilder does not require an additional plugin to do step debugging. Just hit the debug button and off you go.
CFBuilder contains true component insight, meaning that it can introspect components you write and provide ctrl-space content assist. It can be wonky, however, and does require some configuration. But please remember that as of now, CFBuilder is still in beta. My best guess is that it'll be at least a few versions until all the kinks are worked out of this feature. Still, it's a big productivity and learning booster to get content assist on your own components.
CFBuilder provides a "Servers" view for stopping/starting your CF Server. It's built on Aptana and so contains the Aptana "tail log" view, which is great for watching log files. Just like CFEclipse, it has a Snip Tree View.
The CFBuilder "vision" is led by Adobe's Adam Lehman. He's passionate about CF and is a force of nature. I have great hopes for CFBuilder because of Adam's leadership.
Why you wouldn't use it:
For one, it won't be free. Noone outside Adobe knows yet how much it will cost, however. "Extensions" and the deployment features alone may be worth the price. Time will tell.
Because it's an Adobe product, I think it's reasonable to assume that releases will come as frequently as most Adobe products, which means... not very often. While CFEclipse deploys rather frequently lately -- and makes available a "nightly" site for the brave -- CFBuilder will most likely not do such daring-do. CFEclipse can afford to make potentially unstable builds available to the public, while it is perhaps not in Adobe's best interests to do so with CFBuilder.
Finally, it's still in Beta and might not be released for some time. If you get it now and start using it, remember that. In my experience, debugging is wonky, content assist sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and a lot of people have experience crashiness. It's free beta software... you're getting what you pay for. But know that the more you work with this beta release, and particularly if you provide feedback via the public bug database, the better off all of us will be if it provides a best of breed editor for CFML.
Personally:
At home, when I do "designer" work, I use Dreamweaver when I feel that its Templates will help me build a site as quickly as possible. For existing side projects which require maintenance coding and easy deployments, I use ColdFusion builder.
At work, where I do almost no design work, CFEclipse has been my IDE since 2006. I've begun using ColdFusion builder a lot, though currently I split my time between CFBuilder and CFEclipse. One reason is that as of this writing, CFEclipse is more stable (i.e. it doesn't crash and I don't lose work). I fully expect stability problems to be mitigated by the time CFBuilder costs money.
Both CFBuilder and CFEclipse have public bug databases. CFEclipse has a well-attended public mailing list, and if you have questions, you'll get answers quickly. I cannot yet speak to the speed with which CFBuilder questions are answered.
Finally, for "coders", it's my experience that once you invest the time in learning the tools and shortcuts, Eclipse provides superior productivity compared with designer tools like Dreamweaver. For cranking out a designed site, a designer tool like Dreamweaver confers significant advantages.
The answer to the best ColdFusion IDE isn't an answer, but a question: "What are you trying to do with ColdFusion?" The answer to that question will lead you to an IDE that suits your needs for a particular project. Different circumstances or projects may lead you to a different tool which better suits your needs.
Notepad++ with CF syntax highlighting.
For free: Eclipse with CFEclipes plugin
For cost: If you're a developer, use Coldfusion Builder, if you're a front end designer Dreamweaver edits Coldfusion pretty well. I use it quite often.
I have heavily used Dreamweaver, CFeclipse with eclipse and now Coldfusion Builder. What I found is this:
1) Dreamweaver is only good for the few times you have to do some wysiwyg wizardry. The newer versions do have SVN integration so you might be able to get away with using it. I did use it for a few years on windows.
2) CFEclipse + Eclipse - Generally the standard of what' sbeen used for a while. Runs well, once you add in the Adobe dictionary files and subclipse, you have a good environment
3) Coldfusion Builder - This is Adobe's version of CFeclipse. It's still pretty new and getting to later beta. I switched to it about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. It's got a lot of wizards, including the ability to write your own plugins in CFML that will run right inside CFbuilder. It's free right now on beta but will likely be pretty cheap like the first flex builder that came out.
My Choice: Coldfusion Builder. It doesn't mean the others aren't capable, but you'll spend the least amoutn of time getting setup and maintaining your plugins, etc.
Since I had paid for and used Dreamweaver for a lot of years (Eclipse was generally sluggish sometimes on PCs' a while back until the excess of ram + cpu today), spending to have an adobe maintained copy of eclipse is okay with me. The wizards available in CFbuilder, especially for flex are excellent.
Hope that helps, good luck and share what you ended up picking and why!
For anyone who might stumble here from Google, you should also take a look at Sublime Text coupled with the ColdFusion package.
If you are familiar with Eclipse I would recommend Eclipse with coldfusion plugin.
http://www.cfeclipse.org/
Some use Eclipse, some use ColdFusion Builder, some use emacs or TextMate or vim. I use vim.
It doesn't take much time to try out an IDE or editor. Give them all a shot and stick with the one you like most.
The best IDE is ColdFusion Builder. It allows RDS, In Line Debugging, Extensions (written in ColdFusion!), Code Generation, Refactoring, supports JavaScript, CSS and HTML and so much more. It is currently in beta and should be released in production sometime this year.
CFEclipse is a great IDE for CFML and is the right choice if you are writing CFML for the open source engines. It is free and like most open-source free products it can do almost anything Builder can do if you invest the time to install the additional plugins (like Aptana) and tweak your setup just right.
I use both. At work, we use Builder. At home, I use CFEclipse.
Welcome to the CFML community!
Notepad++. Light and easy to use.
I'll vote for jEdit. While it doesn't offer great ColdFusion support beyond syntax highlighting, and therefore probably isn't great for learning ColdFusion, its flexibility in working with other languages (which seems to happen fairly often while working on the web), powerful macros, plug-in support, proper text wrapping, and loads of other features, make it the editor to which I always end up returning after trying out the "next best thing".
CFEclipse appears to be the most popular. Adobe has a beta of ColdFusion Builder (also based on Eclipse) but when I tried it a few months ago it was still buggy.
Personally I use TextMate (OS X) a pretty bare bones text editor.
I have used textpad, for 6 years, still a solid app, provides syntax coloring/highlighting, regular expressions support. Can easily search inside any file, through tons of folders/subfolders.
Just a fast loading, easy to use, tool.
Also has macros, and macro programming...
http://www.texptad.com
I'd like to throw E TextEditor for the Windows users in here as well. Its similar to sublime but it does have its advantages. E is more or less Textmate for windows and will allow you to run the cftextmate bundles. In addition to being lightweight and extremely fast you get the huge Textmate community developing bundles, color schemes, and other community driven content.
Some of the highlights of E is that it will allow you to open a directory and treat it directory as a project. Hitting Shift-Ctrl T will allow you to browse all the files in your project in a flattened hierarchy which allows you to find files extremely fast.
I searching for and IDE that gives me a (mostly) uniform experience on Linux/Windows and C/C++ and Java. I'm somewhat comfortable with using Netbeans on Windows and I'd like to know what to expect of it on C. I heard the Visual Studio debugger is quite good on C, does this extend to Mono? Is it really more powerful than the one on Netbeans?
I've been using NetBeans for C++ development on Linux for the last month or two and love it. I'm working on an large code base 1+million lines of code. As long as your project references appropriately, I've found that NetBeans will provide "intellisense" information with hardly any issues. Now, it's not perfect, and is definitely not as good as Java, but I've not found a better alternative. NetBeans debugger, which is a front-end to gdb, works well also. Much easier, and in my experience more stable than DDD. I've not tried Mono projects using NetBeans so I can't speak to that.
This link explains how to setup a C++ project in NetBeans and may shed more light on the subject for you. This is for NetBeans 6.7 NetBeans C/C++.
Eclipse CDT is quite usable as well
you can use codeblocks it is also a well and exceptionally good for c/c++.
I don't think so, since it consumes extreme amounts of memory and can hog your CPU completely if you have a lot of projects open. It actually uses every bit of CPU it can if it feels for it, and it does so for a long time, rendering the whole application useless. This is of course completely unacceptable for a modern UI application. It also feels kind of sluggish.
Because of this I switched to Visual Studio Code for Linux. It's not a full blown IDE but I don't need that anyways. I'm not in the "flow" of it yet, but I think it has potential.
The problem of VS C++ is don't have intellisense. Netbeans C++ is a good product. But i suggest DevC++ editor, its free and come with lot of pluggins and intellisense.
I do mostly Java and C/C++ development, but I'm starting to do more web development (PHP, Rails) and Eiffel (learning a new language is always good).
Currently, I use Eclipse for Java, C/C++, and Ruby (not Rails). Since I know the environment, I'm thinking that it would be easier for me to find a plugin and use Eclipse for all of my development languages. But are there cases where a language-specific IDE (EiffelStudio for Eiffel, as an example) would be better than Eclipse?
I have used many many IDE's and in most cases to me it breaks down to personal preferences. Sometimes the language specific ones have some addins/addons/features that are nice but unless they are things you can not live without you should go with what is most comfortable for you.
I would think that if you are comfortable with the multi-language IDE it would be better to stick with that one. This way you dont have to memorize multiple IDE layouts, keyboard shortcuts etc.
Mastering an IDE takes time and energy. Using a multi-language IDE is definitively beneficial for a programmer who needs to develop in several languages. It is for the same reason that tools like VI and Emacs are so popular.
On the other side, IDE specialized in one language could sometimes go much further on some aspect and could be the preferred choice in some situations.
I love Eclipse as Java IDE (so much that we decided to build some Eclipse based application) and I'm an Emacs fan. But I also like the Groovy support of IntelliJ and the efficiency of EiffelStudio.
It's a matter of taste, you forgive the ones you love...
It entirely depends on the user and the language itself, if you are comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts then you can consider the plugin else you can go for a IDE . However most of the IDE comes with a cross-functional key maps so you use the key maps which u are more comfortable with....