vanRijn / MovingParts

Blog - page 11

Eclipse versus Netbeans

  • 2 min read

Now, this one I’m really speaking out of the side of my head on… This is totally based on first impressions of NetBeans, albeit after 3<x<5 hours have been invested in said first impressions… I’ve been using Eclipse and CDT for a while for my day job at VMware (which, by the by, totally rocks!!!). And for the most part, Eclipse+CDT really does a nice job at helping me maneuver around our very large code base and lowering the learning curve after I’ve figured out how to teach it about include paths that it can’t figure out on its own. As a C++ IDE, it’s very nice, responsive, stable, and it definitely helps in learning the code base via being able to quickly search, view inheritance hierarchies/object references, and quickly take you to definitions/declarations/usages. I had an itch to scratch with VIM keybindings and from what I’ve seen, viPlugin fits the bill very nicely. In fact, I’ve just today broken down and sent off my $21 for the wee beastie. In response to a previous blog of mine, someone suggested that I look at NetBeans and SunStudio (which is built atop NetBeans) as alternatives to Eclipse as a C++ IDE, so I took some time to learn and explore today. I am definitely impressed with NetBeans in general, and their attention to C++ as a core component (as opposed to Eclipse, which provides C++ as a plugin, albeit a much-more-core plugin than previous). And NetBeans does a much nicer job, imho, in UI clarity as well as getting up and running quickly. Very nice attention to detail, and very good online help. I was up and running with our very large code base in NetBeans almost immediately–orders of magnitude quicker than doing the same thing in Eclipse. And then I tried to set up NetBeans’ Code Assistance. For 4+ hours, on and off (each iteration took a painfully long time to discover that I’d still not gotten it right). Now… to be fair, it sure seems like NetBeans has some nice sophistication here, and gives you 3 ways of discovering how to construct your code model and code assistance goodness:

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Wanted: VIM in Eclipse

  • ~1 min read

I’ve been looking for a way to have VIM functionality inside Eclipse for a long time. SlickEdit has it, sort of, but it’s prohibitively expensive and ugly. And then I saw this nifty little vimplugin sourceforge project and got my hopes all up. Sadly, it’s not quite there yet. After figuring out how to associate .cc files to the Vim plugin (note to vimplugin guys: Maybe stick a README or some docs on how to use the plugin in the tarball?), I saw that I was unable to open more than one VIM tab in Eclipse at a time. In addition, there is no contextual/outline view associated to the code once you’re in the VIM editor as there is with the CDT C++ editor. *sigh Back to the drawing board.

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Okay, I watched the SuperBowl

  • 1 min read

Charlie-Joiner---Action-Photograph-C10108443It actually felt pretty good to “unplug”, as it was put in The Matrix, and allow my brain to focus on nothing other than family, video games, and good old-fashioned American football today. I just realized today that I’ve not had an truly restful weekend in about 3 months, what with new job, travelling, trying to sell a house, realtor-ish stuff, miscellaneous stress, etc. So it was a nice break from overwhelming life today.

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