supersonic feet

As I looked at my taskbar yesterday and saw three different text editors/IDEs open at once, it brought home the fact that there’s no one tool that’s the best for any job. At the time I had Zend IDE, jEdit and RadRails open on my work PC, while my laptop had Komodo on the go.

So why not just use one for everything? Because different editors have different features that help when developing in various languages. RadRails has built-in tabs for running generator scripts or quickly starting and stopping Webrick servers. jEdit allows you to clone/split windows infinitely to make better use of the space on your screen. It’s unlikely any editor will notch up all the features you like as well as support all the programming languages you use (though it’s easier if you just use the one language), so we’re stuck switching between apps.

As such, here’s my personal view on each of the editors installed on my computers, either at home or work: (more…)

Another idea for a text editor/IDE feature along the lines of my previous suggestion on keeping track of things when programming: where you’ve got files from two or more different projects open at once (happens a lot for me as clients phone in asking for quick changes), why not colour-code the file tabs based on the project they’re in?

With a colour-blind brother I’m aware that colour-coding can be awkward, so perhaps some other visual aid should be added too, such as a simple number/abbreviation/symbol in front of the file name to further differentiate. Here’s an idea with the colours based on RadRails (sorry, for a quick idea in a blog post you don’t get the symbols too):

Assign each project a colour and symbol as you create it and in theory at least you can then more easily tell which of the two tabs labelled’application_controller.rb’ it is you want to click on. It would certainly be easier than either clicking  on every file tab with the same name until you get the right one, or hovering slowly over each to reveal the full  path to the file and figure it out from there.