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Home Content A rant over the faults of Eclipse as a good text editor

A rant over the faults of Eclipse as a good text editor

Posted by tibi at Mar 22, 2009 08:18 AM |

Right now the editor of choice for my daily programming is Eclipse + Pydev, mainly because of the superb job Pydev is doing as a Python IDE. With Pydev I get:

  • syntax highlight (including highlight of syntax and programming errors)
  • code formating
  • auto-import
  • import declaration sorting
  • syntax check
  • intelligent autocomplete
  • go to definition
  • management over a project's working set of python packages (for autocompletition)
  • ability to comment/uncomment code

Various plugins for and builtin capabilities of Eclipse will give me:

  • XML editing (for Zope Page Templates) - this is through the WTP
    • syntax highlight
    • syntax check
    • code formating
    • ability to toggle comments
  • CSS editor (code highlight, autocompletition, code formating) - thanks to Aptana
  • Javascript editor
  • Another XML editor
  • Integration with SCM (in my case subversion)
  • Project and file management

Despite the fact that the Eclipse setup covers all my development needs, I am unhappy with it, mostly due to the faulty and annoying XML and CSS editors from Aptana and the Web Tools Project. I edit just as much templates as I edit Python code, so a good XML, JS and CSS editor is a must. The most important step towards getting rid of those broken editors is to use GVim as the text editor, which I've accomplished today by following this advice on how to associate GVim in Gnome with various filetypes. 

The main issues that I'm unhappy with Aptana and Eclipse WTP are:

  • the CSS and XML editors in Aptana don't have the Toggle Comments comment
  • the CSS Editor in Aptana does a crazy job at formatting the code
  • I can't change the settings for the Aptana XML Editor formatting settings (I can change them, but they won't have any effect)
  • the XML editor from WTP is doing a miserable job at formatting text paragraphs (splitting, in some cases, long lines of text into lines with just 2 words on them, even if there's a ton of space to the wrapping border)

On the other hand, Pydev is briliant in its Python integration so I'll need an environment in vim that will allow me to be just as productive editing Python files.

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