Power Editing...

// by Mike Foster : November 14, 2008

One of my favorite books, the one that really opened my eyes about programming is The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. I would recommend it to anyone, especially new graduates as it covers so many things that are just not addressed when in school, things that young programmers take for granted. It’s a great book and will be at the top of my book list, if I get around to making one.

Anyways, in the chapter on basic tools, there is a section called Power Editing.

Choose an editor, know it thoroughly, and use it for all editing tasks. If you use a single editor (or set of keybindings) across all text editing activities, you don’t have to stop and think to accomplish text manipulation: the necessary keystrokes will be a reflex. The editor will be an extension of your hand; the keys will sing as they slice their way through text and thought. That’s our goal.

It also mentions in this chapter that, at the time of the writing of the book, which wasn’t that many years back, a big number of programmers they had met were still using Notepad as there default editor of choice. I remember this out of many of my peers back in the school years, which was only 5 years ago. It amazed me then and it still amazes me now. I found Visual C++ 6 before I understood even the very basics. I couldn’t write an email in Notepad, forget coding in it. This isn’t to say that a slimmed down editor like Notepad isn’t part of my everyday life. Actually, I use Notepad2 a dozen times a day for quick little stinger activities, but not for full blown editing purposes.

But, I digress. I actually wanted to talk about Eclipse. Working on the Blackberry platform, you have two standard choices supported by RIM, the Blackberry JDE and Eclipse with the Blackberry Plug-in . I’ve spent my last three years working with Netbeans,

so I wasn’t immediately open to either option. The Blackberry JDE is stable and does what it needs to do well. However, it isn’t very robust when it comes to editing, nothing like what I’ve come to expect from an IDE. So, I gravitated to Eclipse, and what I’ve learned is that the differences between Netbeans and Eclipse have narrowed greatly over the past few years. In my opinion they are both pretty damn good and customizable enough that they could fit any programmer’s preferences. However, Eclipse is still a bit of a pain to get setup and configured properly. It took me a few days, and it was well worth it at the end, but I’m the only guy in my team not using the JDE. It’s enough of a pain to turn off new users, it has quite a barrier of entry that would have made a commercial software fail a long time ago.

The best thing about switching to Eclipse to me isn’t any new feature or anything that it does differently than Netbeans. No, it’s the fact that I get a fresh start with a brand new editor. There are two points made in the Power Editing section that are actually fighting against each other in reality. First, use one editor. As the quote above says, know it and know it well. Second, the editor needs to be configurable, extensible and programmable. Unfortunately, humans get accustomed to their environment and that’s that. Exploration, reconfiguration is no longer needed or even wanted. Why leave the comfort zone when it’s working so well? Actually, that question is probably further than most would even get. I don’t think it’s laziness. I just think it’s a sense of security, a sense of safety in a super complicated environment/industry. The only way to break out of it is to change editors, to become uncomfortable and feel the need to explore to regain the previous security.

That’s where I am now, Having to change IDEs has forced my hand and I now really want to know Eclipse better than Netbeans. When I read The Pragmatic Programmer for the first time I was already completely at home with Netbeans and though I saw the wisdom, nodding my head in approval as I read the chapter, I never really took it to the next step to figure out what more I could do with Netbeans. But now I’m not taking my editor for granted. Eclipse is going to be my one editor, the one that becomes the extension of my hand, and it’s going to be for quite some time. However, I have seen the way cracking open a new tool can help open your eyes. So even though I plan to keep Eclipse as my default, I plan to explore other editors to keep it all fresh, to see what Eclipse is missing, what I might be missing in Eclipse.

I’ve only been working with Eclipse for a month and I’m still turning over boulders with the new job. But, I am taking notes and I’ll have other posts as I go with IDE/Eclipse related productivity gains I’ve found.