If you are a Windows guy, don't bother to keep reading because I am about to go on a rant about development on Linux / Mac. If you are interested, feel free, just a waring.
For those of you still not using VIM as your "IDE," for Ruby development shame on you! Before the TextMate and Emacs fan boys swoop down and kill me, give me a moment to explain my position.
My requirements for a development platform:
1: Free Isn't just good, it is required
In a world where I am dropping a grand or more on a laptop to keep up with the massive amounts of abuse I deal out, a development suite that is free is a must. TextMate users take note, I enjoy TextMate, but have no desier to pay.
2: Compatibility between systems
For the past few years, I have been on a team with mixed operating systems. Macs, Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Minuix) all of them are in the mix. Switching between pairs for programming requires that we have similar setups, and there for compatible development tools.
3: Bloat is bad, and slow
Current generation IDEs such as RubyMine and NetBeans (with Ruby packages) consume a good chunk of memory and cpu time. This makes them more difficult to run on lower power systems such as VMs or systems pulling double or triple duty. In my case, as with most developers, my development machine is my server, my job box, my queue serer, my poller/ background operations machine, and of course all of the standard office apps one has to run. Allowing my IDE to suck up more then a gigabyte of memory just to load is insanity. Vim and all the plugins I have attached to it, runs in under 256mb. That is right, a quarter of the footprint.
4: Portability is God
The above point brings me to this one. Small is good, small is great, small is powerful. With a development stack that is 256mb, I can now live inside of Minuix. Why? Because now it fits. Load Minuix and Vim on to a USB, now you have a walkabout development environment that fits in your pocket. Going to the girlfriends for the night and need to get some work done? USB and go. No worries about her three year old windows box. Reboot off of the USB and rock some code.
5: Simplicity is power, power is simple
If I am running RubyMine, and my pair is running Emacs, it is almost impossible for us to work on each others systems. Emacs is great, but the level of customization and macros that Emac people seem to run prevent me from taking over the keyboard without spending half the time asking which key does what. This is not something that is worth wile in my opinion. A simple setup is nice. Most of us that have been developing for a while have been exposed to vim for many things. Standard keys for standard activities. All systems that run vim have the same setup. i for insert, escape for command mode, etc. Simple setups allow for simple interaction between pairs.
6: Extensibility
RubyMine comes with everything you need. Or so it claims. In my experience, attempting to get RubyMine to do everything I want it to do becomes an exercise in masochism. You want to run sql from inside of RubyMine? Have fun, you can do it, but its setup is a pain. Just add a MySql, Sqlite3, and an Oracle database to the list of connections and wait for RubyMine to choke itself out. Not fun. Vim has thousands of plugins ready to go that are under active development. I have found everything from typeahead completion, to yaml checkers. Everything you can want you can find. Even found a plugin to do prolog completion.
7: Customization should be optional
I know a few Emacs users that swear by their tool, as they should and more power to them. However, I have issues with a N=1 setup. Emacs seems to attract the type of users that love to customize the setup to the point of obscurity. The user might be blindingly fast at developing on language, but becomes unusable for anything but the intended target. I should not have to customize my development tool in order to use it. Out of the box operation of the tool is valuable to me. I should be able to hop on a brand new install of Nix and use the editor without wondering what happened to my massive list of macros. A simple one line .vimrc file is all you need, and truthfully, it is not even required.
Yea, I know. I am proballly wrong about most of this. But it is my blog, and I needed something to rant about today that wasn't work related.
1) WTF is Minuix? Google (well, DDG) gives me nothing useful. In fact, you're now the third hit for that. WTF.
ReplyDelete2) Dude, vim is eating up 256M of RAM on your shit? What are you running in there? It's 77344K over here on my Linux box, and it's not like I don't load a few things up in there.
3) The Emacs users in the audience would disagree that vim is easier to use if you don't know it :) By that argument, shouldn't you be developing in nano or something over there?
4) For something that you spend so much freaking time in, $50 is really too much? Come on. As a developer you should be happy to pay for good software. :D
Miss us yet? :)
Minux is Like Damn Small Linux but usually used in academic settings. Of course I miss Backstop, well not backstop, just some of the people. MacVim is eating that much including having IRB running from inside of it. So its a full ruby stack with it.
ReplyDeleteAre you talking about Minix? By Andrew S. Tanenbaum? Otherwise, link me here.
ReplyDeleteIf you wanted a damn programming environment in your editor, why aren't you running (x)emacs like God intended? :D