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Is there a good IDE to work with VHDL projects ?
Or are most of the professionals working with emacs/vim/notepad++ ?
I use Emacs+VHDL-mode which is great if you don't mind (or have already climbed) the learning curve of Emacs.
Alternatively, you could try Sigasi-HDT which is Eclipse-based and has more GUI. And some more powerful refactoring tools by the look of it.
I have been using Sigasi HDT since it was released in january (I think) and am very pleased with it so far. Previously I used Vim for all my editing (C or VHDL), but since I switched to Sigasi I have not looked back. The Eclipse based plugin is much more than just syntax highlighting. The auto-completion of components and entities is a real time-saver and you avoid a lot of errors. You can download a free trial from their website (http://www.sigasi.com) and I encourage you to give it a try with grlib (http://www.gaisler.com) to see the real power of the plugin.
Maybe Xilinx ISE or Altera Quartus.
I once tried - at least I wanted to try - Altera Quartus, but I soon switched to a normal editor and took GHDL for simulation.
But I am no professional, so I suppose they are using some of the former two products.
Engineers in large semiconductor companies are using emacs/vim for code editing.
Integrated Development Environment doesn't make much sense there, since a project is a few thousand HDL files taken from different places on a *NIX network, setup scripts for a dozen different tools, and cron jobs to do frequent builds.
For simpler FPGA projects developed on Windows I've seen people using Borland CodeWright, UltraEdit, and Crimson Editor.
I've been using Notepad++ along with the free vendor tools to edit my VHDL on Windows.
My best bet is to use VIM to do whatever i need to for VHDL formatting. VIM has an extremely powerful facility to develop custom plugins, and no amount of IDE hopping will give you all the customization you would ever need.
Things like signal names < 20 characters, procedure lengths < 100 lines, no use of linkage ports -- all of these can be coded in VIM with minimal effort. You could actually run vcom or ncvhdl from within VIM and then see where the errors are.
Having said all this, you might want to take a look at what Sigasi has to offer. If you need more help on this, let me know -- it'd be fun coding a VIM plugin.
Emacs + VHDL mode + a compiler / simulator + source control.
The VHDL mode is configured to use the compiler to compile the design and optionally run the simulation.
Emacs can link with the source control to correctly check in, diff and tag.
I personally like this set up because the editor is open source and I can use it anywhere (Mac, Linux, Windows). The compiler / simulator can be anything from a free download (FPGA vendor sponsored Modelsim or GHDL) to a grid engine. Once set up, it pretty much becomes invisible.
Simplifide also has an eclipse plugin which supports VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog which contains all of the standard IDE features and more.
It can be downloaded at http://simplifide.com
I'm just using Scite, like for most other coding.
Some things in Scite make my VHDL coding pleasant:
Coloring is easy to set up. Either download a ready .properties file or modify the Ada mode.
Scite has a snippets plugin that's very useful for VHDL. All those boring process and architecture definitions are generated automatically for me with a couple of key-presses.
Scite is easy to customize with external scripts: I have scripts for compiling the current file, for fixing indentation, for listing all processes and so on, the possibilities are limitless.
Besides the big ones Sigasi and Simplifide there is also ZamiaCad a free VHDL IDE: http://zamiacad.sourceforge.net/web/
It depends on the kind of project you are developing. Modelsim provides a good IDE but the code editor lacks the advanced features we are accustomed to use. I use VIM to write the code, and Modelsim to simulate, debug etc...
There's another VHDL-IDE, it's a plug-in for Visual Studio, but as far as I could see, it is also available as standalone version (ie, you don't need a Visual Studio license). It seems relatively new, but so far I really like it.
http://www.vide-software.at
I switched to use Vim because it has a very large list of plugins for almost any language (I believe Emacs do also). You might not get the best VHDL IDE ever with it, but you get a familiar interface for every code and non-code you must edit. Plus, as you move between companies, you can take your environment with you.
For the ones using Vim, check vim-hdl. It's a plugin I'm working on that provides syntax checking based on simulators/compilers. I'm using daily with ModelSim and so far works nice.
Emacs with the appropriate language mode is my vote. Basic editing is easy enough to learn and there are a lot of example config files out there.
Kevin.
I'm using Xilinx ISE for educational purposes, it works really well. And it has everything. After applying for a student license, the student version it free to use, but it takes up a lot of space. The installation file alone is more than 6 gb. The book we use for school is referring to xilinx special properties. (“FGPA Prototyping by VHDL Examples”). I'm also programming on a nexsys 3 spartan 6 testboard, and I'll be using xilinx for another year, but when I finish the course I’m gonna look for something smaller. Happy to read about the lightweight alternatives.
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.
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Closed 11 years ago.
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.
Hi I mostly do C++, Objective-C programming. And I found Xcode plus an auto completion/macro plugin (Completion Dictionary) quite adequate.
However, all people seem to praise over their pure text editors. I tried Textmate for a bit; liked its simplicity but dislike its files/framework handling.
Am I missing something here? Or, do Vim or Emacs have auto-completion as good as Xcode?
Pull up a chair son, let me speak on this.
Well before the days of Xcode, there was VIM and Emacs. I know it's hard to imagine, but it's true.
Many people got accustomed to VIM/Emacs, and thus continue to use it.
Emacs is extremely customizable, and offers pretty much everything you can imagine (including a built in shrink and the towers of hanoi). You can easily call compilers from Emacs, and create your own extensions as needed.
VIM has incredible regex engine (Emacs does as well) and is very handy because (VI) comes with pretty much every Unix OS, and works fantastically if you don't have arrow keys (yeah yeah, real old school). People are very good with using keys to move around documents, without having to use the mouse.
The same is true with Emacs as well, but for me, I find cursor motion much easier on VIM.
The text editor war is fueled with as much religious zealotry as the Mac vs PC war, and the answer is pick the best that works for you. If you like Xcode, great, continue to use it, however good luck if you're ever forced to work on a PC or Linux machine. Personally, I use Emacs to code, VIM to manipulate text and Firefox to look at lolcats.
I really don't understand why emacs props up when people talk about text editors. In my experience it's more like eclipse (or one of those other platforms/IDEs) than vi because it is an environment, which happens to be good at text editing.
As an IDE emacs features version control, live compilation, spell checking, auto completion, debugging, code browsing and lots more for a wide variety of SDKs. For the rest of your computing needs it's an email/news/web/irc/twitter/xmmp client, calendar, organizer, calculator, terminal emulator, remote editing, speadsheets, games etc. etc. etc.
After Dijkstra: "Emacs is no more about text editing than astronomy is about telescopes"
What you are missing is that Emacs and Vim are actually IDEs.
vi is ubiquitous on UNIX systems, and Emacs almost so. AFAIK, Xcode is on one platform.
Having a powerhouse IDE is a great thing, but everyone should have a smattering of skill to keep them functional on any platform they might be dropped into.
It's all up to your preference.
Some people like to work with lightweight texteditors like (g)vim, emacs, pico, etc.
Others like to work with IDEs like MS Visual Studio, Eclipse, Xcode.
As long as your environment is compatible with the text editing technology, it's all up to you.
By the way, I like working with Eclipse and vim because they are what I used to learn programming ;)
The main reason you seem to think people like Emacs/Vim is for code completion. People like Emacs/Vim cause they are both MADE for editing text. You have control and options available to you that other editors just don't have. Once you get REALLY good at using one of these programs you want these key bindings / commands available everywhere. Macros, regular expressions, moving around by search/word/paragraph/function, interfacing with version control, complicated undo/redo and copy/paste functions and extension options are just a FEW of the things that these editors do really really well.
Code completion is just one of MANY things that can make writing programming easier. Emacs/Vim can handle ALL of them (natively or by exntensions).
No, not really. It's a matter of preference really. I liked working in Visual Studio 6, but nowadays the newer versions are just too bloated. So if I can do something outside VS I usually do it without opening the whole IDE box.
On windows I like notepad2 and gvim. I've customized vim to the point where it suits my needs perfectly, so I don't have to think about what and where.
But, it's good to mention that (you could also figure that out by yourself by reading these kinda posts) a lot of users uses vim/emacs/... 'cause of the heard-its-the-best/cool-factor/actual-usability. So if it doesn't suit you, don't use it. Nobody's gonna look you the wrong way cause of that.
For me most the two most important features are:
Emacs key bindings, as that is what my fingers are compatible to.
Open-source, for the freedom it provides. Being tied to one platform is anathema.
These days I mostly use Eclipse for programming (set to Emacs keybindings) and FSF Emacs for reading mail and some occasional LaTeX.
I personally love emacs. I've used vim and a handful of IDEs. Vim and emacs both have great communities where people are willing to code up features for just about any language. I don't know of any IDEs that, say, support Haskell. It all depends on what's important to you. Both have extension languages, though IMO, emacs lisp is the better of the two. The ability to ignore the mouse is the main thing I like as well. So many IDEs also feature emacs and vim compatibilty modes or extensions. They both have a large time investment, but both are worth it. Sooner or later, you will choose which suits you, vim/emacs/IDE, and then stick to improving your skills with it.
When you are using Emacs, you can install Cedet or Autocomplete package to use name completion for some languages (C++ is pretty good, while Obj-C is still not supported), in addition to rich editor functionality
emacs is powerful. I use emacs with vimpluse.el so that I can use the vim key bindings with all the emacs features.
I use Vim mostly for the input model. Once you have become proficient in the input model, going back to an editor where you are forced to use a mouse feels clumsy and ultimately (at least to me) irritating. It is a lot more efficient to type "ci'" to alter all the text between two single quotes, then taking your hands off of the home row, finding and selecting the text with the mouse and finally hitting 'delete'.
I have only used Emacs briefly and while I prefer Vim, I am jealous of some of its features. But I ultimately went with Vim because I find the chord-input model that Emacs uses to put unnecessary strain on my fingers.
I have Xcode and TextMate and I don't use them although I know they can be very powerful. Instead I use Vim (or MacVim if you prefer). Why ?
Because it's light, fast, addictive, powerful, customizable...
I could go on like this for a long time but the most important thing is that I can do all I want with Vim.
Whatever the editor you use, the best editor is the one you master (almost) perfectly.
I don't use vi to do my coding; however, I do, when available, use vi emulation in my editors. When I am doing Java coding in IntelliJ I use the IdeaVIM plugin which gives me vi support in IntelliJ's editor. This means I almost never have to take my fingers off of home row. I navigate with the keyboard (h,j,k,l), cut/paste with yy, dd, etc. And of course when I do need the power of a full feature GUI editor vi emulation doesn't keep me from using those features.
It drives me nuts that XCode doesn't have vi emulation in its editor. Seems like functionality that any decent IDE should have.
TextMate just feels lighter to me. Off the top of my head:
It has great support for jumping between files and methods within files. Think Quicksilver for files/methods. With a file open for editing, hit command-shift-t to bring up a floating panel listing all the methods in the file. Start typing and the list filters itself down. Select the method you want and hit return to jump to it. Xcode has something like this but the sting matching is more literal.
Lots of built in text expansion. Type a trigger and hit tab to have it expanded. For example, on a new line typing m and then hitting tab creates a method for you. The tab key then intelligently jumps to the various parts of the inserted text so that you can edit them in place. These are such a huge timesaver it's ridiculous.
Nice plugin support for Subversion and Git. Probably other VCSs too.
Completions (like Xcode) and history. TextMate allows you to tab-complete basically any text that exists in the file. So once you type a variable name or method call once, you can use tab to auto-complete it anywhere in that same file.
Smart past board with history, nice built in diffs, theme support, good keyboard support, find in files and across projects (with RegEx) and probably more that I'm forgetting.
Anyway, that's enough from me.
Personally, I love TextMate, because it's actually a really lightweight solution. Granted, I have not used Vim or Emacs in depth (I like my GUIs)...although I do thoroughly enjoy the Control-based cursor navigation (Control-A is beginning of line, Control-E is end of line, Control-F and Control-B are forward and backward, etc). So between Xcode and TextMate, I use Xcode for most of my serious development, but if I just need to quickly edit a source file I can be up and coding before Xcode even finishes launching (it helps that TextMate can remember which files were previously opened and restore them). So for some lightweight text editing, TextMate is my choice.
Above that, TextMate's plug-in support is amazing; it provides full support (syntax coloring, building & running, etc.) for so many different things (shell scripts, CSS, SQL, LaTeX, and much more) that Xcode doesn't provide. When I need to brush up a quick program in Java or tweak a webpage, it's a lot easier then using Vim and then building from the Terminal.
My only complaint with TextMate is that the console is read-only, so I can't build anything interactive. That, and the fact that it doesn't seem to support C99 keywords (for loops and booleans) in a plain-C file.
I am a long time vim user, and find that I really like Komodo edit with the Vim emulation turned on. Thus, I get all of convenience of the vim key bindings (to which I have become so accustomed that a recent MS Word document that I recently produced had no less than three ":w"s in it) plus the well implemented code completion for C++, Python, javascript, etc.
I don't use XCode because I don't develop OS X specific applications very much and so the benefit of the OS X framework integration isn't large enough to outweigh the cost of not having vim key bindings and the "do it our way or not at all" approach that Apple takes toward development.
Xcode is more of an IDE, whereas emacs and vi are for pure text (though they have massive extensions to them). This is preferable if you're on an older system or over an SSH. In addition, they're pretty much on every UNIX based computer, whereas XCode is proprietary Apple software.
You might have a look at my essay on the subject Why Emacs?. While it's more or less Emacs-centric some of the points made in it would apply to vim and TextMate as well.
I tried vim a long time ago and for one reason or another "I didn't get it". Then after trying other editors over the years I reached a point where no editor seemed to do what I wanted it to do. After voicing my frustration to a friend he recommended that I try vim....and I am so glad that I took another look because it was the answer to a question that I didn't know how to ask! I have used Vim/MacVim ever since...
here my configuration:
https://github.com/RandyMcMillan/QuickVim
I use Xcode as well because it is nice to have code completion.
XVim is good for people that want a modal/vim feel in the Xcode editor:
https://github.com/JugglerShu/XVim
But when it comes to my day to day editing Vim wins every time. That is why I have the QuickVim repo is so that I can quickly reproduce my environment anytime/anywhere.
I have a list of licenses for editors like TextMate, etc..but it is likely that I won't ever use them since I can use vim for free and customize it to my exact specifications.
Heavy Vim user here. I generally find the text manipulation capability of Vi/Vim far superior than traditional editors which lack things like:
visual mode: e.g. prefixing 5 lines with comment //
macros: e.g. surround 3rd to 5th words in a line with quotation marks, repeat for 100 lines
multiple registers: think 36 registers to copy and paste
delete{motion}: e.g. delete from cursor up to the next occurrence of 'initWithFrame'
These are just a few examples that Vim has XCode text editing beat hands down
For Objective-C. I tend to install a Vim plugin on the IDE to get the best of both worlds - native build / UI components support.
Incidentally. Emac keyboard bindings (e.g. CTRL-A to go to top of line) are supported in a lot of native (Coacoa) text fields on Mac. Including the one you're using for typing answers on stackoverflow :D
XVim works with XCode. IdeaVim for AppCode
Does anyone know of an alternative IDE for Sybase Powerbuilder? It feels pretty clunky, after working with VS2008 and Eclipse.
If not, has anyone successfully worked with this language outside the IDE? I'm not against using a simple text editor, but I find edit-import-regenerate-test-export-edit is clunkier than simply using the Powerbuilder editor.
To date, the only tools I have had any success with are:
PowerGen, for builds (with NUnit and CruiseControl.NET)
ConTEXT, which has syntax highlighting for Powerbuilder
PBL Peeper, which has some interesting features not present in the IDE
EDIT: I added a bounty to draw some wider attention to the question. It would be a very nice thing to have, if it exists.
EDIT: Well that was disappointing. The bounty apparently did not cause even 1 new person to look at the question.
None that I'm aware of, although you could probably use a source control tool, edit in your source control repository, and Get Latest Version from the PB IDE to shorten your text editor cycle. Be warned that there are hacks required to edit anything over 128 ASCII. (My guess is that this is to allow everything Unicode to be source controlled in the most restrictive source control tools.)
As Paul said, PB12 is coming with based on the Visual Studio shell, and will include things like collapsible code blocks, Intellisense, etc.... However, for PB12, this will only be used for WPF targets and a few .NET-type targets (like assemblies), last I heard. Win32 targets will continue to use the "classic" IDE.
Good luck,
Terry.
P.S. Thanks for the PBL Peeper compliment.
The PowerBuilder IDE is clunky, but I don't think developing completely outside the PowerBuilder IDE is a good idea. I think there are just too many dependencies right now.
However, the IDE for PowerBuilder 12 will be built using Microsoft's Visual Studio Isolated Shell so it ought to be much better when that is released. Also, I believe they'll be doing away with the PBL format which ought to make source control much easier to work with.
Certainly something to watch.
What I do is right-click the object and edit source. Then I copy the text and paste it into Notepad++ to edit. I copy and paste back to PowerBuilder, then I can save and see any errors. I've got a fairly decent User Defined Language for PowerScript if anyone's interested.
Added:
Please be aware that I've seen the PB Source editor corrupt DataWindows. They were all large DataWindows. To be safe always export DataWindows to edit.
One tool that will most probably make your PB experience way better is Visual Expert, which provides a good source browser. Such a tool should have been integrated into the PB IDE a long time ago, IMHO. Only problem is that it's not free, as opposed to the other tools you mention.
Regarding using external source editors, you can probably take advantage of OrcaScript, which is a scripting language that lets you perform actions such as export and import of PB objects from outside of the IDE. It will require some effort, but you can setup a basic dev env using batch files with ORCA scripts and some additional external tools. However, this setup will lack any visual editing capabilities, which means no (feasible) GUI or DW work. If you're mostly into NVOs, it could work. But then if that's the case, why use PB in the first place?...
I too have heard PB12's use of VS will be limited to some .NET stuff, which will probably benefit only a very small portion of the PB programmers community. I'm afraid the rest of us are stuck with the awful IDE for years to come.
Other than exporting the source and editing it I don't know of another IDE for PB. One problem you may have is that the exported source contains a lot of syntax that is not documented in the manuals. The PB IDE generates this code but there is no support for creating it by hand. I think you are stuck with the PB IDE
In my modest five Years of experiences starting with Powerbuilder 5/6, now using PB 10, I tempt to :
build my own browser from the classdefinition object based on Powerbuilder
tried to use autohotkey in order to open datawindows comfortable (we have several thousands in the project and i am two-finger-driven)
truly investigated in the idea using an external editor/IDE suppoted by an autohotkey script which is undermined by sybase allowing only mouse-click-usage of PB
using Visual Expert which is neither a truly integration in the IDE, nor is really worth in analyzing datwindow/powerscript interaction
ending by build hopes on PB12 Visual Studio, which lacks - depending on compatibility issues - ...
... i came to the conclusion that there will be no chance in improving Powerbuilder to an state-of-the-art language
In my philosophy - I obtained during those years - I distinguish between two types of OOP-oriented languages:
the one that award using object-orientation like C#, Python, Ruby (C++) etc. and very much the Java-Eclipse/Netbeans-Universe does
the other one that punish using object-orientation like Powerbuilder and the old Visual Basic, for example (which is causative the OOP-Idea comes afterwards and is "plugged in").
Especially the demand that all object should always be compiled (regenerated) and that you could't work with ancestors and descandants concurrently makes it painful to use real OOP.
...In memory of the good old Unix(Solaris)/C++ days...
I was researching a replacement solution that would be similar to PowerBuilder and I came across two that caught my eye.
The first was 'React Studio' https://reactstudio.com/ which I found via Alternativeto.net .
And the second was from an ad at the top of some Google searches but it was similar enough and looked good enough at first glance for me to want to take a closer look at it, and it's called 'Servoy' https://servoy.com/ .
Still researching but I currently have React Studio at the top of our list.
The TextPad editor has a syntax definition file for PowerBuilder 6.x contributed by anr#aon.at that I downloaded for free and customized several years ago. It works fine for later versions (including 8), doing keyword color highlighting on PowerScript srx files. Editing large source files in PB could get it to crash so it's usually safer, faster and more convenient to export to srx file, edit outside the IDE then re-import.