whatastruggle.com

Still very pleased with my MacBook and gradually getting more and more comfortable with the Mac OS X I decided it was time to get down to business and try some different developer tools. First of I installed a trail-version of the TextMate editor, which I have heard so much about. The fuzz is not for nothing, it actually has alot of nice features (and by alot I really mean ALOT!). The supported environments are abundant and features everything from C to Ruby-on-Rails and LaTeX. The user interface is not very user friendly though and it is evident that it is a tool for the developer and not-so-much the ordinary LaTeX report writing student (whom I might try convincing to use it) . But after a little while you get ahold of it and then all the nice features easily makes up for the steeper learning curve.

Next off I tried installing Eclipse a highly customizable Java IDE that is very popular. On my Windows XP machine I have NetBeans installed with which I have been very pleased. Although neither NetBeans nor Eclipse are quite as productive to work with as Visual Studio (in my humble opinion ) I am quite surprised how effective these IDE’s actually are. Contrary to NetBeans, Eclipse also features the possibility to use plug-ins. This for example makes it possible to support additional languages such as C#. Ofcourse I had to try this, so I downloaded Improve’s C# plug-in and installed it. After playing around with it for about 15 mins my impression so far is that it still has a long way to come. Altought both syntax highligthing, code-completion (which I could not get to work) and indentation are supported, it still seems too be lacking to much for my taste. But on the other hand I’ve grown an absolute addict to Visual Studio’s code-completion.

Next off I am going to try out the Mono project. Also I might try out the CSharpPlugin for Xcode (Susan Mackay has written a very thorough article on the use of this plug-in in the respect of developing for Mono).