starting to work as an IT man lately
with some programing background,
there are so many occasions where there's a need for processing large amount of data.
mainly strings i guess..
for example:
there's 2 large sets of lines, and we need all the lines in both of the sets
replacing one or more white characters in a row, to one line break...
taking the 4th to 7th character of each line and print them in one line with comma as a delimiter
these are not the best examples, but generally any kind of parsing, manipulating and query of texts.
it's very often that the task is extremely easy in any programing language, but it is just to frustrating to open the IDE of such language....
i'm looking to some way to write code (with intelisence/autocomplete), in an easy fast window...... with simple input and output textboxes....
do you understand my need? can you think of anything that can help?
i know some of the problems can be solved using excel.. but i really prefer some good old programing.... unless someone is strongly believe i'm wrong.
if i will build something myself, there will be an option to add any amount of unlimited multiline textboxes. they'll be automatically named, although the name is changeable (the names will be the the name of the variables).
you can as well add any number of output textboxes that have names...
and you have the editor window, in which you write the procedure..... and it will have some interactive intelisence like interface...
can you see what i'm saying? do you know anything similar?
Seems like Python would be fine for this.
Has an interactive keyboard interface, quite nice abstraction facilities,
and strings as objects with good libraries for processing such strings.
It sounds like a lot of what you want can be handled with regular expressions using sed, awk, or perl in a standard console. Autocomplete will be pretty limited, but your scripts will be short anyway - to deal with your third case above, for example:
sed 's/^...\(....\).*/\1/g' < input.txt | tr "\n" ',' > output.csv
What you can do is use an interactive regex tester. There's many online like this one.
You could also look into tools like Data Wrangler from Stanford, which are designed to be more accesible but as powerful as traditional shell tools.
(Note that your first issue - intersecting sets of lines - is a bit different, and would be solved in the shell with comm. This page has a good explanation of how to use comm to perform set operations like "all the files in this file not in this file" or "only the files in this file also in this other file".)
Related
I am looking for a method of macro creation that allows for text to be typed as a human would, key by key, as opposed to pasting blocks of text all at once.
I'm open to just about any option that can achieve this, including software options. I've been looking for a full work day and found nothing that doesn't require that I manually program them out key-by-key. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Both of these options have a record macro feature so you type out the text once then map that macro to a (set) of keys.
If you are doing a lot of coding then I would suggest Netbeans. It is great for adding code blocks, or simple settups. I have had
System.out.println();
mapped to Ctrl + Alt + p for a long time and it has come in really handy while programming Java.
If you have a lot of different files to work with and need an editor that can handle almost all languages than the other option I would recommend it Notepad++. It can handle almost any language that you may need to work on and has many other features that help out.
it bothers me:
why can't i "soft return" in intellij (or any IDE actually)?
is there a way i don't know of to "X + return key"?
situation: i want to copy&paste long paragraphs into a translation.json.
Afterwards, i want to format them with html tags.
So why can't i have
"translation": {
Hi!/
this is/
the text./
maybe there is a/
LINK too?/
/
Second Paragraph/
/
This is the second paragraph./
}
with /being soft wrap markers
instead of
"translation": {
Hi! this is the text. maybe there is a LINK too? Second Paragraph This is the /
second paragraph.
}
(it makes inserting the html tags a PITA)
why can't i "soft return" in intellij (or any IDE actually)?
Most likely because it is not a highly desired feature. Secondly, from a practical standpoint, the implementation would be cumbersome because most file formats an IDE uses are ultimately plain text. As such the file does not have a concept of a soft return. For an IDE to support arbitrary soft returns, it would need to maintain a data store containing the metadata of where in each and every file you've ever edited you want soft returns.
Or alternatively, the soft returns would need to be stored in the file. But the only way to do that and not "effect" the actual code in the file is via comments. Such as how an IDE uses comments to suppress warnings, create an arbitrary folded block, or turn off auto formatting. (And of course, with your example, JSON does not have comments, further complicating things.) Using comments for soft returns would, I think, result in a lot of clutter in the file. For example, for HTML, even using a one character comment of a paragraph symbol "¶" results in a lot of clutter:
"translation": {
Hi!<!--¶-->
this is<!--¶-->
the text.<!--¶-->
maybe there is a<!--¶-->
LINK too?<!--¶-->
<!--¶-->
Second Paragraph<!--¶-->
<!--¶-->
This is the second paragraph.<!--¶-->
}
You could always request a new feature to add support for something like this to IDEA, but I'm fairly sure it would unlikely gain any traction (based on 13+ years of IDEA usage and very active community membership).
I agree with #Peter's comment that more detail about the workflow you have might help. Ultimately, the Paste as plain text action he mentions is likely the solution. Or you can turn off reformatting on paste in Settings > Editor > General > Smart Keys > "Reformat on paste". See the following help page for more information: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/smart-keys.html
I often heard Snippet Expansion by an IDE, but I searched and couldn't figure out that it means. Could you explain what it is?
Snippet expansion allows you to type short sequences of characters, hit another key, and have it expanded out into a larger amount of code. This is useful for quickly writing common chunks of code.
The above image shows me writing a simple C++ program with the use of snippet expansion. I include the header, I just write inc and hit tab. To write the main function, I write main and hit tab. Similarly for the for loop and cout expression.
It means typing in a sequence of characters, e.g. "if()", pressing a keystroke, and having the IDE look up in a database for the replacement, e.g. "if(|) {\n}", and putting it in the editor in place of the sequence.
It is the feature of some ide's to expand on a certain sequence of keys which is useful to type something faster on not type it at all. Like when you start typing for and it expands to a for loop.
Personally, I use vim, and snipMate.vim enables just that. The example video is here.
The goal of IDEs is increase productivity. They do a great job at that. Refactoring, navigation, inline documentation, auto completion help increase productivity immensely.
But: Every tool is a weapon. The very same IDE helps to produce chunk code. Some IDE features are an invitation to produce bad code: code generation, code formatting tools, refactoring tools.
IDE overuse tends to isolate developers from the necessary details. It is a good thing that you can start working but at some point in your career you have to be able to figure out how to start a process. You can ignore this detail for some time, in the end they are important to write a working product (vs. bolted together stuff that works 90% of the time).
How do you encourage positive behavior of other developers working with an IDE? This is a question as old as copy and paste.
To get the right impression: developers have to have the maximum freedom to mobilize their maximum creativity and motivation. They may use IDEs and all the related tools as they see fit. Nobody should impose draconian measures on them. I don't want to demotivate and force someone to do something. Good behavior has to be encouraged. It has to itch little a bit if you do the wrong thing. In the same line as the SO "accept rate" metric (and reputation). You can ignore it but life is better if you follow the rules.
(The solution should work in a given setting. You can ignore reviews, changing the staffing or more education as potential solutions.)
Train your IDE, instead of being trained by it.
Set up code formatting the way you (or your team) wants it. Heck, even disable it in cases where it makes sense. I've never seen an IDE align something like this with a sensible combination of tabs and spaces (where \t is obviously the tab character):
{
\tcout << "Hello "
\t << (some + long + expression +
\t to_produce_the_word(world))
\t << endl;
}
In languages like Java, you cannot avoid boilerplate. The best option you have is to check generated code, ensuring that it is the same as what you'd have written by hand. Modify it as necessary. Configure your IDE to generate the exact code that you need, if possible. Eclipse is pretty good at this.
Know what's going on under the hood.
Know that your IDE is actually invoking the compiler. Have some insight into the flags that it passes. Be able to invoke the compiler from the command line.
Know about the runtime system. Be aware of the flags that are used or needed to launch your program. Be able to launch the program from a command line.
I think before anyone uses a RAD tool of any type they should be able to write the application from scratch (scratch being wiring together the framework components) in notepad potentially on a computer that is 10 years older than current technology :P. Not knowing the ins and outs of a paradigm/framework leads to bad code from novice developers who only learn things at a mile high view of the platforms they develop for. Perhaps they should do this in a few technologies -- i.e., GTK programming is completely different to MVC which is then also different to SWING and .NET.
I think the end result should be a developer that thinks of the finer details of a problem before they jump to thinking of how they will write an interface to it in a specific RAD environment.
its an open ended question, but...
We have a Eclipse format file that everyone shares, so that we all format the code in the same manor. (Except the one lone InteliJ guy we have).
Everyone shares a dictionary file. It helps to remove all the red lines from the code. Making it look cleaner and more readable.
I run EMMA over the code to find out who isn't testing their code, and then moan at them.
The main problems we face is that most of the team don't know all the features/power of the IDE (eclipse). The didn't know about CTRL + O (twice), or auto code gen. All I can do as a 'hot key wizard' is keep sharing my knowledge with them to help them become more productive.
I look forward to the day when my problem is that they auto gen as much as possible.
Rather than me finding bugs where the wrong value is returned from a getter method due to a typo.
Attempt development (at least occasionally) using only a text editor and launching the compilation, testing, etc. from the command line.
Typing the commands will get tedious very quickly so create scripts or (even better) learn rake, ant, msbuild.
If the IDE does code generation for you and that code generation is really important (such as generating classes from xsd or proxy classes from wsdl), try to find out how to run the code generation from the command line - then hook the code generation into a build (so you'll never be tempted to edit the generated code).
The idea of autoformatting code is great but it usually just turns your code into a mess. If you have less code, minor formatting inconsistencies are just not a big deal.
Adding code quality tools into your build - style checks, class and method sizes, complexity, code duplication, test coverage, etc (complexian, simian, flog, flay, ndepend, ncover, etc.) will discourage IDE generated code.
Just as the title says, I see a lot of editors touting macro recording as a feature but cannot find a way to take advantage of these functions myself. So what can you use it for? The type where you can record mouse movement and/or keystrokes? Is it really that helpful to people out there? Specifically, I deal with Eclipse which has a number of built in "fill in" functions, so I really don't see what the advantages could be.
I use them all the time. Say, for example, I want to go down a list, indenting by 4 and adding a "|* ". In EMACS, I hit C-x ( to start recording, do one example line to see that it's what I want, ending with C-n C-a to move to the next line, and end the macro with C-x ). Then C-x e repeats it line by line, and C-u number C-x e does it many times.
Depends on what you are doing and what language you are work with. As a simple example, right now I am working with a Visual Basic .NET application that has a number of queries in it. I generally do all of my work with queries in Toad, but Visual Basic .NET has an annoying syntax when it comes to long strings, namely:
Public Const SelectData As String = _
"SELECT * " & _
"FROM myTable " & _
"WHERE myField = :SOMETHING"
Since I really don't like editing the queries when I copy them out of the code or pasting them back in, I have some macros that will automatically format or strip the formatting from them.
Also, some of the macros can be used to automate common tasks that you need to do around the IDE while you are working. Any sequence of commands that you see yourself doing often is something that you can turn into a macro and do with just a single click.
Waaaay back I used a macro to make function header/comments. Other than that I have not used them.
Basically you can "automate" tedious things you do often that do not have built in ways to do the tasks you do frequently. It is a flexible way to give lots of power to people so they can work more efficiently.
I find it very useful in microsoft excel. Rather then having to look through documentation to find every object and function I need to call I can record a macro that does most of what I want, take that code and modify it to give me finer control.
In Visual Studio, I use macros for many different purposes. One of the most valuable comes when debugging Windows service. I can use the macro engine to start and then attach to the Windows service which just a click of a button.
Also, sometimes I use custom DEFINES that need to be exploded into code--sort of like C/C++ macros.
Colby Africa
I don't use them in Eclipse either.
Here's why:
Eclipse has many powerful built-in functions and refactorings. So with code, its not necessary.
Eclipse macros aren't that great. You can record them, but its hard to tweak them and do exactly what you want.
Macros become more useful in things like modifying files that aren't code. For that I tend to use something like vim. Also, you have to actually practice using macros to recognize when they will help.