(Note: geekery ahead)

Since I currently work on a platform that doesn’t have any sort of real integrated development environment (yes, I linked to the right place–I really do ColdFusion programming), in the past 18 months, I’ve jumped around between coding software quite a bit. The short list, with comments, contains:

• PSPad: Not a bad editing, and free-as-in-beer, but not free-as-in-speech. I used this for a long time, until I found…
• CFEclipse: A pseudo-IDE for ColdFusion built on the popular Eclipse IDE. I thought it would be useful because you can (theoretically) debug your debug, but because of the way we’ve built our application framework, this just didn’t work. I found I didn’t really like CFEclipse’s keyboard shortcuts, and it could be a bit of memory hog, so I jettison it in favor of…
• Notepad++: Free-as-in-speech (and free-as-in-beer). This is a pretty decent editor, a bit nicer than PSPad, though lacking the massive library of plugins (at this point). Syntax highlighting is a bit wonky, and I could never figure out how to extend the highlighting to multiple file extensions (there were also highlighting issues with Javascript, too). Not entirely happy with this, I tried…
• Vim: Ah, yes, the old standard. I used Vim a lot in the old days, and knew just enough about the cryptic modes and keyboard commands to be dangerous. The GUI version for Windows actually does a pretty job of combining the “standard” keyboard shortcuts (like Ctrl-C for copy) with Vim’s weird stuff (like 7 yy to copy 7 lines of text below the cursor). Then today I found…
• Cream: A “modern” Vim configuration. Basically, it’s just Vim with a Really Big configuration script that adds some ease-of-use shortcuts that mimic the more standard shortcuts, plus gives you more configuration options from the menu (as opposed to editing the .Vimrc file). The one addition I really, really like is the ability to cycle through tabs with Alt-Tab. Good stuff, so far.

Posted on 11 July 2008