Am I using the "right" IDE?

[Stuart Goss]

Howdy, (shikes, that sounds strange)

Anyhow, was just chatting with a fellow Cattle Driver and I was asking about which IDE is being used.
Now, I know my coding business colleagues mainly use the Notoriously Ubiquitous Eclipse,
but I've never breached the gap completely between vi(m) and a full blown IDE.
I went so far as to use Textpad years back, and currently I'm compiling and coding my
assignments in Geany under Ubuntu 12.04_LTS.

At work I keep to RubyMine, as I only create Cucumber framework tests, muddling around with Ruby
or just keeping to Gherkin, if anybody can follow me.

So what recommendations or experiences have we got here?
Shall I keep to Geany, or go the whole way? I do admit, I'd love the automatic functions of Eclipse,
displaying the API doc while writing code, adding packages as I go along and automatic extensions.

Or is it all "Hands off" until you know what you're doing, "go back to vi(m)", "don't bother us with your silly questions"

(Hats off to Blondie, TGTBATU)

[margaret gillon]

I use Microsoft languages at work and they have their own IDE. (Visual Foxpro, SQLServer). I have been working with servlets for several years and have made a couple little projects at work that are used by employees for simple queries. At first I used Netbeans IDE because I was working my way through Murach's Servlets and JSP and all their sample projects are setup in Netbeans. I started using Eclipse when I was experimenting with Bear's Frontman framework and the Netbeans standard project layout messed up the compile. Part of it was the way I set up the project, but part of it was the way Netbeans was using jar libraries. I tried Frontman in Eclipse and got it working so I've stayed there.

For the Cattle Drive servlet projects I do not use the standard project structure for either IDE. I use the project structure recommended by Tomcat -- something that Bear recommended doing. To work with the files in Eclipse I just open the individual file instead of opening a project. I do not have Eclipse build the .war for me. I use an Ant script and run the build from the command line. When I started on Servlet 3a I posted about the ANT script, Greg sent one but it was buggy, I posted it in the Ant forum and then Bear and Greg helped me get it cleaned up. The best thing about IDE's is that they will reformat the code when the logic has been changed so I don't have to re-indent everything by hand.

Many times I will work outside the IDE and if I am on windows I use notepad or wordpad.

I have never heard of Geany and I am going to try it. I like gedit on ubuntu because it will format and do syntax highlighting.

On DOS I use edit.exe

[margaret gillon]

I was looking for more information on the Sublime Text Editor and found this interesting thread . . .

What editor do students use for assignment

The discussion includes various IDEs the moderators prefer.

[Janeice DelVecchio]

For the cattle drive, I personally encourage coding the first two sections (Java and OOP) in notepad++, textpad, or notepad.

This will give you a good idea of how the compiler is called, compile errors, etc.

I use eclipse in my free time, and whatever I'm asked to use at work