Is this book dated?

Agreed, I was more trying to point out that discarding a tool just because it costs money is not a right mindset (especially considering its price). I didn’t say there weren’t any other tools (free or not) available that might be someone else’s cup of tea. A former collegue of mine swears by Eclipse, but hey, I don’t understand his choice of women either :smiley: Joking aside, you should first look at the tool and how well it works for you and afterwards take money into consideration.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

I agree with Peter. I've tried a lot of editors, and TextMate is definitely my editor of choice.

It has a lot of bundles for almost any language or task you could imagine, and it's easy to customize those bundles.

I've paid it with my own money, too. It's worth every cent of its price.

Michael Pavling wrote:

If TextMate is the tool that works for you , not willing to spend $50 is just foolish to say the least.

But if it isn't the tool that works for you, then it's foolish to pay $50 for it.

Exactly. My job gave me a copy of TextMate. I think I used it for one session, then went back to KomodoEdit. I certainly don't see it as being worth $50 for the way I work.

However, knowing that NetBeans has now got visual Ruby debugging inspires me to give it another try for Rails at some point. I still don't think that Rails benefits from its heavy IDE nature, but visual debugging and the Git plugin might be a good combination if both work.

Except...while writing this, I just found out that NB (like Eclipse) *still* doesn't have word wrap in 6.9, even though it was promised. Generally speaking, I don't like to work in an editor without word wrap. Back to Komodo, I suppose. Oy.

Best,

Michael Pavling wrote:

visual debugging and the Git plugin might be a good combination if both work.

The Git plugin was a bit poor when I used it last (six months ago now...). But the Mercurial plugin works just fine for me!

Except...while writing this, I just found out that NB (like Eclipse) *still* doesn't have word wrap in 6.9, even though it was promised. Generally speaking, I don't like to work in an editor without word wrap. Back to Komodo, I suppose. �Oy.

See... it's horses for courses...

That's actually not what the phrase means; it means more like "use the right tool for the job at hand". :slight_smile:

I *hate* word-wrapping! And turn it off on any editor I can :slight_smile:

My goodness, why? It's long been a tenet of user interface design that any interface that requires horizontal scrolling of text probably needs to be redesigned. I do occasionally write and read long lines of code, and it's essential to me to not have to lose context by scrolling horizontally. (Granted, it doesn't happen often in Ruby since the syntax is so terse, but when I need it, I *really* need it.)

Anyway, we're going way off topic here, so I probably shouldn't go on.

Best,

Michael Pavling wrote:

See... it's horses for courses...

That's actually not what the phrase means; it means more like "use the right tool for the job at hand". :slight_smile:

This is the meaning I'd apply to it...

...and that's the sentiment I used it with.

I *hate* word-wrapping! And turn it off on any editor I can :slight_smile:

My goodness, why? I do occasionally write and read long lines of code, and it's essential to me to not have to lose context by scrolling horizontally.

For me, I "lose context" when the next "line" is actually a continuation of the previous. Of course, I avoid long lines where possible (refactor and rewrite to get rid of them), but where I come across them (for instance looking at a CSV) I want no wrapping! :slight_smile:

Anyway, we're going way off topic here, so I probably shouldn't go on.

True enough... back to the grind.

You raised a good enough point that I can't resist one more reply. :slight_smile:

Michael Pavling wrote: [...]

My goodness, why? I do occasionally write and read long lines of code, and it's essential to me to not have to lose context by scrolling horizontally.

For me, I "lose context" when the next "line" is actually a continuation of the previous. Of course, I avoid long lines where possible (refactor and rewrite to get rid of them),

Right. At the same time, if the clearest form of an expression is wider than my screen, I'm not going to worry too much about rewriting it just to have short lines.

but where I come across them (for instance looking at a CSV) I want no wrapping! :slight_smile:

Ah, now that's an interesting point. For CSV, I'd often agree with you -- tabular data should probably be presented at full width. (Though for quickly viewing a CSV file, I'd be inclined to use a spreadsheet or something to put it into tabular form, so I probably wouldn't be doing much examination of it in a text editor in the first place.)

However, source code feels to me more like running text. When I'm reading English text on a Web page, I don't want my reading flow broken by scrolling back and forth. The same is true for me for source code.

In KomodoEdit, we can each choose the word-wrapping setting we like -- it's a configurable option. But in NetBeans, I have no choice but to scroll left and right. The developers keep promising word wrap in the next version, and keep breaking their promise (even though it's a priority 1 issue on their tracker!). It's a frustrating stupidity in an otherwise good IDE.

Best,

Every book is likely to contain some errors, most will have forums where you can ask questions of the subject material as well.

Netbeans has everything I need. The side panes which show the project structure and page elements which make not only navigating, but understanding, the project easier. The code completion rocks and really helps when editing html templates and css files as I try and do as little html as possible.