Online programming IDE

[~]

Suppose that there's some sort of IDE that you can use through your web browser, and that you can see all of the source files of the project.

And suppose that one is working over the Linux kernel which has more than 1000 files, and displaying the directory contents through the web could take a very long time, each file would delay more and more to be listed.

Would you find that acceptable? Or would you prefer to browse in a multi-paged directory, or maybe browse as if you were in a regular file manager?

[Alboin]

Suppose that there's some sort of IDE that you can use through your web browser, and that you can see all of the source files of the project.

Your first problem is the internet IDE. I wouldn't use that. Period. So, to me, the rest is irrelevant. (Although, an internet version of nethack might be to my liking...I could play anywhere... )

However, if I were to use it for some reason, I guess I would like it to be just like a regular file manager.....

[hakware]

Well, I have things against IDEs in general, but I like the idea of a wiki-like system integrated with, say, SVN, which I suppose would be useful. For such purposes I usually ssh into my home server, though, and just use vim and command line tools ^^;

Of course, in XANA, both the development environment and the runtime environment are essentially spread across an arbitrarily large network, but in that we're not loading source documents, but instead just a single instruction or docpage at a time. Whether the overhead is more or less, time will tell. On the other hand, because of the versioning, many of the traditional problems with dependency conflicts can be solved simply. Granted, it's not in a traditional IDE format, but IMO, IDEs are pretty useless and this is actually an improvement in programming structure. Someday, someone will probably write an IDE for XANA (and a compiler, and so on), but tbh, just that achievement alone proves that an IDE is not necessary

[Tyler]

Well, I have things against IDEs in general,

That is the single stupedest thing i ever heard. You might as well say you have a thing against user interfaces in general. Just because you don't like a lot of IDE's (or you simply feel cooler usign a command line) doesn't make them all bad.

[hakware]

IDEs are inherently slow and graphical, and I dislike things that use GUI features to actually detract from the usability. This is from my standpoint, mind you, as I have a functional memory and usable typing skills, so it's usually easier for me to write a shell script or a makefile to compile my program and then use it, than to go through the annoyance of going through a complex set of menus, tabs, and options with a mouse (which I believe is inherently unwieldy, outdated, and basically useless for anything aside from certain graphics applications and functions where pointing is inherently necessary) just to set options I can look up anyway.

I have this argument constantly with people who have grown up on coding in windows. People who started out using IDEs tend to prefer them, because they're used to them, and have grown to depend on them (a good example is how one of my CS professors used intellisense for every function call, and then repeatedly used the wrong one anyway). I have only used IDEs in basic high school introductory CS courses, and by that point I was already more used to coding in vim.

I understand some people may feel it saves them effort, but I find it costs me more effort, as well as the fact that I actually value the control it takes away from me.

[Alboin]

IDEs are inherently slow and graphical

Slow and graphical aren't reasons to hate something. Maybe you should find a faster PC, or a faster distro. (I've recently found that Gentoo is blazing compared to Suse. KDE starts nearly instantly.) As for the graphical, GUI's are useful for many things. Hating them in general is like hating everyone who wears hats.

[hakware]

I hate when GUIs are used when they're inherently not necessary. I find them more difficult to use, especially when they're badly designed (as is often the case), and I dislike when GUIs overuse graphical effects just to be "pretty".

[Tyler]

I hate when GUIs are used when they're inherently not necessary. I find them more difficult to use, especially when they're badly designed (as is often the case), and I dislike when GUIs overuse graphical effects just to be "pretty".

Inherently? You really need to research that word. So you disagree with using a GUI source code editor? I believe GUI's make every task in programming easier. They make text more accesible and provide a new way to visualize certain aspects of the development cycle.

And if IDE's are slow, then write a better one. Also, the definition of IDE does not insinuate graphical, i am pretty sure i have seen dos based IDEs.

[hakware]

Inherently = of its essential nature. In other words, tasks which do not, of their essential nature, require GUIs I do not think should have them. I realize that there have been, in the past, IDEs which are not graphical, but in the current usage of the term, IDEs are considered to be generally graphical (and in either case, IDEs for dos in my experience utilized the WIMP paradigm, so I consider them GUIs even if they are console-based). I say this because vim (and even emacs, which is far more like an IDE than I'd want to deal with) is not considered to be an IDE. Even the graphical forms of such are not considered IDEs. And mind you, these have source hilighting, which is basically all I want in a good text editor. vim suits me fine, since I'd never use the functionality to compile a program from the editor anyway (which vim has) -- that's what multiple terminal windows are for!

[Tyler]

So you believe that a specifically designed, single process, application... is inherintly slower than a multitude of terminal windows all running different applications with less communication inbetween them than India and pakistan?

Well each to their own i guess... but i can't help feeling that your argument really ahsn o bearings. It would not be hard for you to write an DIE that does exactly what you want quick for example.

[pcmattman]

You know, I used to have to use Notepad for my OSdevving. I got so sick of the simplicity that I moved to Notepad++. I have never looked back. I perfer the features that an IDE can provide. Notepad++ can list all my functions for me, when I double click on one I'm taken there. I can also get code colouring which means I pick up keyword spelling errors.

IDEs are a necessary part of software development. They save time by managing files, builds, queries etc...

[hakware]

Most text editors in *nix are designed for coding in, and therefore have syntax hilighting (what you call "code colouring"), and so on. For me, my makefiles and directory structures are complex enough that most IDEs actually couldn't generate makefiles that would properly function with my code organization without a lot of work on my part, so I don't save any time having it write my makefiles or build scripts for me. Compiling is something I want to be able to do while opening several files, so that I can come up with the reason for compile errors or link errors before its done.

But anyway, the original question in this thread was effectively "what would be the best way to do an online IDE, since it can be slow". I answered that in my second paragraph of my initial response. I'm sorry if I took stuff off-topic.

[frank]

I don't think that you can be off topic in the General Ramblings section, but with the IDE that I use (Eclipse + CDT) you have the option of letting it create the makefiles or creating them yourself. I just like having the option of pressing CTRL-B and everything gets built. Plus it has a built in error locater. You can click on the error in a list or errors and it takes you straight to file and the line.

But back to the topic at hand, I don't think that I would ever use an online IDE. Mainly because I have dial-up but for other reasons as well. I think that it would be nice though if all of the code was stored on a central server and if the server built the code into the executable. That could speed of builds tremendously. This may already be possible but I don't know. Now that I thik about it, I would use an online IDE if it mirrored a copy of the code for safekeeping on my computer and offered all of the stuff that I already talked about, but only if I got high-speed internet.

[hakware]

Well actually, you can do that just with a shell into a server with svn access and build tools. You could probably run something like KDevelop from the server itself, though it'd be massively slow probably. On the other hand, vim and emacs have key combinations that you can set up to run make, and I believe emacs can probably run automake and autoconf from key combos too (and possibly guide you in creating the .am files and such). I don't use such features, since i find that having two terminals open and ssh'd in is faster and easier (for me) than compiling stuff and waiting until everything's compiled before being able to edit my code again (I like to navigate to whatever part of the code is screwed up and fixing it when I see the first compile error, and continuing as I see more, so by the time it's done compiling I'm usually about finished fixing those errors, since it's often stuff like typos and missing semicolons and forgetting declarations and such (mismatched parens/curlies are annoying)). Also, I usually don't use makefiles, and I certainly don't use automake, instead preferring to write build scripts in bourne, since they're easier to write, more portable (pmake vs gmake vs smake vs... etc), and have better access to useful features (such as name completion/substitution, redirection, and list conditionals).

[anon19287473]

Suppose that there's some sort of IDE that you can use through your web browser, and that you can see all of the source files of the project.

And suppose that one is working over the Linux kernel which has more than 1000 files, and displaying the directory contents through the web could take a very long time, each file would delay more and more to be listed.

Would you find that acceptable? Or would you prefer to browse in a multi-paged directory, or maybe browse as if you were in a regular file manager?

Thats what Subversion is for
There are a # of online programs to browse source repositories (koders.com is one).

I would perfer something that can
A. Cross reference variable names
B. Has good keyboard shortcuts
C. Allows me to move quickly between files/buffers without breaking stride. Tabs might be nice to
D. Has close integration with SVN so that I can quickly update repo's