Marnen Thanks for your comments
> Ah, good point. Emacs is my favorite console editor, but I'm not all > that crazy about the graphical versions I've tried. Actually, I use Fedora, and installed the gnome version of emacs, so I do have the graphical console, but your comment about learning the keystrokes is valid. When you've been used to the normal windows style keystrokes, the emacs ones take a bit of getting used to. But I am getting there by forcing myself to use it for my real development. I am already beginning to feel more comfortable. > NetBeans is an excellent IDE, but it's overkill for Rails. (I'd be > curious to know about it's sluggishness, though -- it has consistently > been pretty fast for me on Snow Leopard.) I do like NetBeans, but I found it is hungry on resource, and I notice a distinct delay when browsing the file tree or opening a file etc. Also, the auto suggest popup boxes keep coming on. I turn them off but they reappear. I find that annoying because they frequently pop up just as I have finished entering a line, and their appearance causes a delay whilst they are escaped. I may be missing a setting somewhere to turn them off. For portability, I actually use a small machine for development, which is probably why NB feels a bit slow. > Then I'd almost say you shouldn't use Emacs. You definitely have to be > comfortable with keyboard commands to get the most out of it. I already make good use of filename auto complete in the linux shell and am finding using that for locating files is good. I have figured out that using partial complete brings up a list of filenames for selection and I am getting to really like that. > > Syntax highlighting is great > > Any better than in other editors? Not necessarily better, but haml and sass highlighting is available which is not true for all other editors (I actually like bluefish a lot, but I havn't found a haml/sass option). Flagging of syntax errors seems pretty good too. > You might want to investigate a GUI version of Emacs, then. I don't > like the ones I've tried, but you might. The Gnome emacs has a Buffers command in the menu which is great, but I get a 2 second delay between clicking a command and the menu appearing. Also, I do a lot of work across vpn to my sites, so I want to force myself to learn the keystrokes rather than depend on the menu. I have to admit to using the menu cut and paste quite a bit. I haven't yet mastered doing this easily with keystrokes (i know there is a way of switching emacs to use the standard cut and paste keystrokes, but it seemed that doing that would interfere with other emacs commands so I haven't tried it - perhaps I should). I do like the ability to operate on a rectangle of text though, on some occasions this can be useful. > IMHO, so does KomodoEdit. Actually, Emacs "coming close to [TextMate]" > is a funny statement: Emacs is probably the more powerful of the two. I havn't used Textmate, so I was really only commenting on what I had read. The two areas I want to start to get to grips with now are auto formatting and text snippets, but where do I find the info for them? eg what is the correct way to create a new def. With NB, when you start a def, the end is often created automatically with correct indentation. How can I do that in emacs? > C-k, C-y, C-y. There may be a faster way. If you don't know this, you > *really* need to spend time on Emacs basics. I have started using this sequence, it just seemed a bit odd to remove something first to replace it twice but after a while you don't even notice. Tonypm -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-t...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
