IDE that uses an external editor?

[skip]

One thing that's kept me from even looking at IDEs is that to the best of my
knowledge none of them will integrate properly with external editors like
Emacs or vi. I know lots of tools support "Emacs-like keybindings", but
believe me, I've never found one that does a decent job of that. There is
just so much more to powerful editors like Emacs or vi than a handful of
cursor movement commands. Once a person is proficient they generally won't
accept substitutes.

So, please prove me wrong. Are there any IDEs that will actually work with
an external instance of Emacs (either by firing it up or by using a remote
connection program like gnuclient)?

Thx,

Skip

[sjdevnull]

sk**@pobox.com wrote:

One thing that's kept me from even looking at IDEs is that to the best of my
knowledge none of them will integrate properly with external editors like
Emacs or vi. I know lots of tools support "Emacs-like keybindings", but
believe me, I've never found one that does a decent job of that. There is
just so much more to powerful editors like Emacs or vi than a handful of
cursor movement commands. Once a person is proficient they generally won't
accept substitutes.

So, please prove me wrong. Are there any IDEs that will actually work with
an external instance of Emacs (either by firing it up or by using a remote
connection program like gnuclient)?

For Java, I know Netbeans uses an external protocol to talk to other
editors. Both XEmacs and vim are possibilities.

Recently, other projects like agide have started using the netbeans
protocol. My guess would be that something like agide is exactly what
you want: it's more of a "tie my editor, project builder, debugger, etc
together seamlessly" concept than a "you will use this editor, this
project builder, and this debugger" concept. Sort of an unintegrated
but federated development environment. It's all written in Python, but
it's still sort-of in its infancy.

[whatintheworldisthat]

Like said before, pida is a great IDE that supports vim as its external
editor and also the default editor called Culebra, I've used pida
myself and it has some nice features. It's still rough around the edges
and has bugs, but its useable.

It's written with the Kiwi framework, wich is a wrapper for PyGTK.

It has a codeoutliner pane (using ctags I think, but it looks very
clean), file explorer pane, project files, todo list, and even a built
in doc viewer (didnt work very wll with some docs). It also has a
todolist pane and a pane that displays errors caught by PyLint (very
useful). It has a built-in terminal and python interpreter. Supports
CVS and SVN for your projects!

For the most part I just use Vim alone, but pida definetely seems to
have a lot of potential. Be sure to get the latest version; I would use
pida if it wasnt for some minor bugs.

http://pida.berlios.de/

[robert]

sk**@pobox.com wrote:

One thing that's kept me from even looking at IDEs is that to the best of my
knowledge none of them will integrate properly with external editors like
Emacs or vi. I know lots of tools support "Emacs-like keybindings", but
believe me, I've never found one that does a decent job of that. There is
just so much more to powerful editors like Emacs or vi than a handful of
cursor movement commands. Once a person is proficient they generally won't
accept substitutes.

So, please prove me wrong. Are there any IDEs that will actually work with
an external instance of Emacs (either by firing it up or by using a remote
connection program like gnuclient)?

I don't use an IDE when coding on *nix, but I use decent Pythonwin on
Windows (never found one of these other monster IDEs fluent/better enough)

It detects immediately when a file on disk changed and asks to reload
form file or not - any good code editor should do this. The sc1-based
editors ones do this usually. Thus one can without worries edit in
different editors simultaneously.

Also in Pythonwins py-code or .ini settings it would be very easy to
implement a 1-liner for a key stroke which opens the current file in an
external editor. So that should do it.
The same practice should be possible easly with almost any *nix IDE
which is written open source in python or lisp ... or has other easy
script customization capabs.
(But I think there are no decent python IDE's on *nix :-( )

-robert