CODEWITHSUNDEEP
eclipsevisual-studioemacsvi
user15486
user15486

Reputation:

Will emacs/vi ever be able to implement Intellisense/Refactorings as well as Visual Studio and Eclipse?

I love the old school editors because they enable users to absolutely fly through their code, editing almost as fast as they can think.

However, they suck balls at awareness of their environment, lacking robust implementations of features like Intellisense (pre-emptive strike: no, there really isn't an intellisense implementation in emacs that is trivial to install and doesn't suck) and common refactorings (pre-emptive strike #2: "global search and replace" does not a refactoring tool make). (i.e. It would be nice to be able to use nothing but vim to develop in .Net, but at the moment it is an ill-conceived undertaking at best).

I love Visual Studio/Eclipse/XCode because they are so integrated with their environments that I almost never need to look up API documentation, and can refactor fearlessly.

However, they suck balls at basic text manipulation and macros (relative to vi/emacs), are not available on all platforms (with exception of Eclipse), are likely either going to change nontrivially or perhaps just not be around in the next 10-20 years, and most importantly, are unable to run tetris.

Will we ever see the day when emacs or vi will be able to be as tightly integrated with .Net, Java and Objective-C projects as Visual Studio, Eclipse and XCode?

If not, is it because of proprietary concerns? (i.e. would require emacs to ship with a copy of the .Net framework)? Or is it just because at the moment our team doesn't have the manpower?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 865

Answers (3)

Stefan
Stefan

Reputation: 28541

I think a significant part of the reason is technical and is due to Elisp: Elisp is very slow, and it lacks libraries. A good IDE requires a good parser, various auxiliary data-structures, and needs to be fast (e.g. parsing many files).

Upvotes: 1

Tom
Tom

Reputation: 7586

See eclim which provides Eclipse features for Emacs/Vim, so you can work in your favorite editor while having intelligent completion and other features supported by an Eclipse backend.

If we don't have the manpower to implement these features natively then the best we can do is to utilize the features implemented by others.

Upvotes: 1

JaredPar
JaredPar

Reputation: 755041

Why not load a Vi / Emacs emulator into Visual Studio / Eclipse and get the best of both worlds?

There are free versions of both for Visual Studio 2010 and above.

Eclipse has some as well.

Upvotes: 2

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