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

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Thursday 26 January 2006 00:40, Alexander Dymo wrote:

> I've been watching at core KDE developers for three years. They still use
> vi (emacs). Why? Looks like KDevelop doesn't have clear benefits as
> a development tool for them. This is, of course my opinion and I'd really
> like to hear from KDE developers what they think is wrong in KDevelop.

I'm not really a core KDE developer, but I spend about forty hours a week 
coding on Krita and KOffice, and I use KDevelop -- but only small parts of 
it.

I don't compile from kdevelop, can't get used to it, I don use documentation 
from kdevelop, I don't use the automake manager: I don't use all the things 
on the left or right-hand fringe and it irritates me that I cannot disable 
them. I don't debug from kdevelop -- never got it to work. I use qt: and kde: 
from the minicli for documentation.

In fact I use kdevelop over and above XEmacs (my previous favourite) for just 
a few reasons:

* I can have the menubar on top of the screen instead of in the window itself.
* quick-open is handier than opening files in XEmacs
* autocomplete, broken and incomplete as it is is still handy (although I
  wish it wouldn't try to autocomplete every word in a comment with all of the
  symbols it knows)
* searching in multiple files works nicely
* indentation while typing works just as well as in XEmacs
* it supports unicode, which has become vital now that there are files
  created by Gábor Lehel in Krita.
* I can remember the shortcut to switch between header and implementation, 
  which I never succeeded to do in XEmacs.

And I still use XEmacs to correct the indentation of an entire file, because 
kdevelop can't do that, and I still use vi when I need to make a quick edit. 
KDevelop takes so long to start that I only use it when I know I've got most 
of the evening for coding. I sometimes miss the simple word completion of 
XEmacs. I definitely miss being able to split the window, to the extent that I 
often have a konsole with vi alongside kdevelop. 

But I'm a very simple-minded user. I never take the time to thoroughly learn 
anything: as soon as I can do what I want to do I stop investigating. Which 
means that I use kdevelop as an editor with a bit of code completion and
the shell to compile, just like I did when I was an XEmacs, a vi, a Nedit or a 
Jed user.

Oh, and I use kdevelop only for C++. Python is better handled by XEmacs and 
Java by Eclipse.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
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