Editor extensions to get a full IDE (was: An Editor that Skips to the End of a Def)

[Ben Finney]

Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.42.desthuilliers at wtf.websiteburo.oops.com> writes:

> Ben Finney a écrit :
> > Both Emacs and Vim are highly customisable text editors. They are
> > configurable with complete programming languages specific to the
> > program, and both have a huge community of programmers writing
> > useful extensions.
> 
> FWIW, emacs has
> [...]
> - ECB (emacs-code-browser), that adds a file explorer and
> functions/classes inspector

Thank you very much for making me aware of this amazing tool. I've now
been using it for a couple of weeks, and not only does it work
smoothly with Python, it works smoothly with loads of other source
file formats, such as targets in a Makefile or changelog entries.

This is really important, because developing programs is much more
than just editing files in one language. A "python IDE" is all well
and good, but it's much better to have a solid generic text editor
that can be extended by the community.

When the editor supports hundreds of common (and less-common) file
syntaxes that are associated with programming, the job becomes that
much more streamlined. I had become accustomed to this with syntax
highlighting, but I'm very pleased to see that ECB has a similarly
broad support for organising and browsing the variety of file syntaxes
I'm likely to be editing when developing with Python.

It also goes without saying that it's great to have all this with
*optional* GUI support; it all works just the same when I'm connecting
to a text terminal remotely over a slow link.

Talk about "huge community of programmers writing useful
extensions". Wow.

What's the equivalent in the Vim world?

-- 
 \                 "He who laughs last, thinks slowest."  -- Anonymous |
  `\                                                                   |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney