Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4

[Michael Pyne]

On Wednesday 25 January 2006 19:57, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> > So yeah, when i'm working in konsole, I open my emacs, it opens pretty
> > quickly and once it's open i never move my hands from the keyboard.
> > That's just extremely convenient and I think that's /one/ of the main
> > reasons why people still use emacs/vi.
>
> Ok.

I agree on the mouse thing.  Even when I forget what vim command does 
something, I can type ":help some-word" from the keyboard and see if vim can 
point me in the right direction.

> > Workflow using those editors is very different.
>
> Could you please give several things you frequently do in vi/emacs?

1. Opening the header for a file in a split window.  Usually this is to see 
the API or documentation for a function (for which the intelligent tooltip 
feature in KDevelop would be nice if it would ever work), but sometimes it is 
in order to find a enum declaration or just something else in general 
instead.

2. :%s/foo/bar/g is ever popular.  (%s means search-and-replace over all 
lines.  The /g modifier at the end makes vim search and replace multiple 
times in the same line).  A Gui tool makes sense for this when s/foo/bar/ 
isn't what you want.  But 95% of the time s/foo/bar/ is what you want, and so 
having to open a dialog is a chore, not a help.

3. I very often leave vim in order to run make. ;)  It is quick to exit and 
quick to return to a file, in the position that I left it.

4. Another thing I'll do in vim is to mark a line that I'm at (using 
'm<letter>'), go somewhere else, and quickly return to where I was by using 
"'<letter>".  That is, the apostrophe key followed by the mark letter I 
selected earlier is all I have to type.  This lets me have multiple marks and 
quickly switch between them.  I'm pretty sure there is something like this in 
KDevelop, but the interface takes too much time.

These are all features built into vim, without the extra support scripts 
available in kdesdk/scripts that I don't use.  I mean, I'd like to use 
KDevelop, but as you mentioned, it seems to not really mesh with my workflow.

It was (and still is) cool for quickly starting new projects.  But a lot of 
the features didn't live up to their promise when I tried it.  For example, 
the API auto-completion didn't really work at all when I tried.  The 
documentation browser was a good idea, but had too much documentation (if 
that makes any sense).  I don't need all the G* and Java references when 
writing a Qt app. ;)  So I just used Konqueror in that case.

I don't blame KDevelop for the compile times, but hopefully things will work 
better with the KDE 4 build system, when we finally get it finished and have 
apps starting to port against it.

One thing that KDevelop has going for it is that the Kate guys know how to 
write a syntax highlighting engine.  It is consistently better than vim's, 
especially with my kdesvn-build Perl script.  But then, that helps everything 
that uses KWrite, not just KDevelop.  I'm afraid that pretty soon Kate may 
really be the KDE developer's preferred graphical IDE, and KWrite will be the 
simple text editor.  No offense to Anders on that, it's just that I still 
want to be able to be more productive with KDevelop.  It just doesn't seem to 
work out that way.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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