Quickie Informal IDE Survey

Good morning all,

I'm trying to get an idea of how often developers customize their IDEs.

A UI book I read recently (About Face?, can't remember) started off by making an interesting point - people just want to get work done. Their goal isn't to learn your GUI inside and and out; it's to write a program, file taxes, etc.

Along that line, I'd like to know how often developers go that extra mile to customize their environments. Have you ever built a custom toolbar in any of the MS apps? (DevStudio, etc.). Have you ever added/removed items from an existing toolbar? Ever customize or try to customize a pull-down menu?

I'm wondering if all the time spent on making GUIs customizable (aside from fonts and colouring) is really worth it?

Rob

Heh... sounds like a Microsoft developer re-thinking the whole "Smart Document" feature in Office 11... or not.


I don't know that I've EVER customized a development tool in regards to actively programming something for it. I stick mainly with Emacs, and, for the most part it has served me well with what it already has. I've never written an extension for it or anything. To be honest... I didn't even know any of the MS development tools WERE extendable.

Gasp! (re: MS developer) The name's "JAVA"rob, I couldn't be an MS developer!

If the UI books are right, it will be some great ammunition in my never-ending crusade against people trying to sneak more and more complex things into our GUI.

Thanks a lot for the reply! I'm hoping for more like it!

Rob

I use xemacs, and I have customized some things about it's syntax highlighting because I'm color blind. I also edited a few behaviors as well, though honestly xemacs makes this very easy (well, for emacs at least) to do. So I'm a tweaker, I guess.

Interestingly enough, both my father AND mother (!) are color-blind. . . What hope did I have? My father is red-green, my mother is blue-green. I'm a combination of both of those.

PLEASE make whatever you're making have customizable color schemes- remember, something like 5-8% of men are color blind and may need to tweak things.

I think maybe I misunderstood the post, so let me elaborate:

I too have (some) trouble with colors, so I usually flub around with color schemes including those in xemacs (not emacs - I use xemacs to be very specific). At the regular job I use Multi-edit, and, frankly, I've never even looked at most of the menus dealing with customization. I made some tweaks to it's behavior with perl modules (why the hell would it use different indentation and highlighting schemes for modules and regular perl files? Who's brilliant idea was that I wonder?), but otherwise, I think it's simply too bloated. I've also used Context extensively which I really like because it's not so laden with junk features. However, it did miss some things I'd have liked.

I guess like with most things, I prefer moderation. Don't make 90% of your environment customization "features" because they only get in the way of the useful features. However, there are some key tweaks that I want in a good editor: color schemes, indenting, code/block completion (I HATED the way Multi-Edit always wanted to put my curly brackets on blocks when I hit enter - I'd have thrown the PC out the window if I couldn't change it's behavior.), shortcut keys, etc.

But you can count me among the people that doesn't like feature glut. I prefer when things ship with the bare essentials and let you add modules to them as you need them.

Well in general I customize the applications as much as possible, when it's easy to do so.
First thing I do when starting up a newly installed application is change the settings using whatever GUI is available to tweak the app.

As for my editor ((k)vim!): I've tweaked my .vimrc quite a bit to suit my needs & preferences more (example: mouse support both in XFree86 & console mode; other color schemes; automatically-added info about the author + the licence the script falls under when I open a .sh, .pl or .py file;...).

I think the possibility to customize an application (certainly one as trivial as an IDE/editor) is very important, but the default settings should be able to be 'good enough' for everyone (so persons who are colour-blind should be able to use it, too).

Applications which have a programming language to customize it are very popular:
(x)emacs -> lisp
vim -> its own 'language'
mIRC -> its own language
xchat -> perl, python or C

So apparently the possibility to tweak an application makes it more popular.

So it seems that there are some things that are important for reasons that may or may not be related to personal preference. For example, your work environment or visual impairment may dictate that you choose your colours a certain way, aside from the "I like pastels" personal preference you may have. These should be preferences.

Generally however, I posit that a feature set enabling you to perform the majority of your tasks in a streamlined manner is the goal, rather than giving the user a swiss army knife and assuming that they will take the time to figure out how to tailor their environment. I believe that they won't!

I believe that developers from *nix backgrounds have a tendency to develop complex GUIs for these reasons. They're used to figuring things out, and assume that in general, users are comfortable with this notion. If your target audience is suspendered Linux users (I'm a Linux user, so calm down =) then fine, but I think most people just want to get their work done and leave at 5pm (as one author put it).

Rob

Most people don't want to 'get their work done and leave at 5pm' in the GNU/Linux community, since they are mostly hobbyist coders, which want as much as possible to make their hobby as pleasant as possible - that's most hobbyist coders don't use kate, nedit or gedit: they need the configurability that vim & (x)emacs offer.

On the windows planet though, it's different I think

Actually Ludo, vim is customizable in many languages, including perl, python, ruby, and I think tcl.

At any rate, I use vim and have even written an article on customizing it for your own use, and I have done some pretty decent customization. Mostly just settings and stuff though, not much actual scripting. Language-specific settings and keybindings, and that's about it.

Really? So you can just put pl/py/... stuff in .vimrc?
Never heard of that. I guess that leaves only mirc as an app with only its own language... although I vaguely remember its extensible trough tcl, too, but I've never seen anyone doing this.

BTW your article about vim is really good, it helped me a lot

I personally use Emacs on both Windows/*Nix. Of course, if I'm programming in Delphi or C++ Builder, I use the built in IDE, but for general purpose editing in Windows, I usually use Emacs.

The reason I use Emacs is because I came across is a long time ago and am comfortable with it. Another major reason was that I learned early on how to remap my keys to an IDE I used previously. To this day, my keymaps for certain functions in Emacs are mapped as follows:
F1 Help
F2 Save
F3 Load
F9 Compile

In case you're wondering, that's because the keymaps coincide with an IDE I used and liked a long time ago. It's the keymapping that Turbo-C 1.0 and Turbo Pascal 4.0 used for their IDEs!!! Older versions of Turbo Pascal used Wordstar keymaps and the later versions had both keymaps for backward compatibility!