It is something of a tradition within the open source movement, and any other truly geeky community for that matter, to claim to program in the most basic of command line tools.
Today, the options for choosing an IDE are endless.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
In Linux and other open source operating systems this usually equates to claiming an affinity for Emacs and Vi. It is a partianship that inevitably sparks heated debate on mailing lists the moment some unsuspecting 'newbie` asks the seemingly innocuous question: "Which is better? Emacs or Vi?" The result is most often a protracted and vicious war of words that inevitably culminates in a straw poll to determine a winner.
It is something that I succumbed to early in my Linux experience and in order to feel part of the community I set about learning to use these two editors. My favourite was Vi after a short while - primarily because it involved far less commands than Emacs just to get started - but I soon tired of them and realised that if I ever hoped to produce even simple code in a reasonable time, I was going to have to accept defeat and look for an easier and more intuitive development environment.
At the time, there wasn`t much in the way of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) tools and the closest that one came to an IDE was a graphical text editor such as Gedit and Nedit, both of which were a whole lot simpler to learn than Vi or Emacs.
Today, however, the options for choosing an IDE are endless and although most of them are still very early in development, they do hold an enormous promise of turning open source operating systems into production-level development tools.
Two of the best
Two of the current tools that truly are up to scratch are KDevelop and Quanta. KDevelop is the first serious and truly open source attempt to create a professional-level development environment and as such, it does a rather good job. KDevelop is part of the KDE project, and integrates rather nicely with the KDE desktop. Its primary function is to be a C and C++ development environment and includes all the tools one would expect of such an application.
Programmers can manage projects using KDevelop, as well as building documentation for their applications using the built-in documentation features. Together with Trolltech`s QT Designer, KDevelop can also be used to build QT graphical interfaces. Code debugging in KDevelop uses the traditional open source gdb debugger although external debuggers can also be used. Finished code can be compiled and prepared for distribution through the same interface. Using the standard KDE interface design, KDevelop is easy to learn and just as easy to use.
Quanta is another open source IDE, but in this case focuses primarily on Web development. Similar in look to KDevelop, Quanta supports a range of Web languages and scripting options including PHP and Java. Syntax highlighting can be altered depending on the project and standard HTML code such as tables are included as menu options. Project management features are built into the interface. The most critical feature for any development environment is to be able to have multiple files open at any one time, a feature both Quanta and KDevelop support.
With tools like these available to developers, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to use something like Vi and Emacs, no matter how good they were in the past. Both Quanta and KDevelop are more than adequate for small and medium-sized development companies, and while they are probably not yet suitable for high-capacity developers, it is enormously encouraging to see the open source movement significantly closer to creating a truly professional development environment.
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