• Development

    Finally Happy with an IDE

    I’ve been using Vim (yes, their website is painful) almost exclusively as a tool for writing code since 2008. I’ve had many people tell me the benefits of using a good IDE, but have never felt comfortable leaving Vim (and leaving my keyboard, if you know what I mean). I love giving demonstrations and showing people the power of Vim. It’s a great editor, as you probably know.

    Recently I started using PHP Storm and really liked what it offers. I do see the benefits of using an IDE. After a quick search I discovered IdeaVim, which is an incredible vim emulation plugin that works for PHP Storm. Its user rating is high, and let me tell you… it works very well. It even handles macros! I do still use Vim (the actual application) on my servers every day, but for anything that requires debugging or is more than “just a php file” I will fire up PHP Storm (where I now still have most features of Vim anyways).

    JetBrains is the company that makes PHP Storm. I write a lot of Python and am starting to dabble in some Javascript frameworks. I was happy to discover, through some IDE-shopping and comparing, that JetBrains makes PyCharm (which has a free community edition) as well as WebStorm (which looks robust). Both of these applications also accommodate the IdeaVim plugin! This is a win-win, for sure.

    I just installed PyCharm and WebStorm and don’t have much time with them yet, but I’ll try to find the time to update when I have mustered up an opinion of them. I did fire up, in PyCharm, a script I’ve been working on. Right away PyCharm informed me that I was using sys.exit() without first importing sys (the call was within a function that rarely gets used). Once I added import sys  to my script I was also happy to see completion suggestions after typing “sys.