Why do so many of you use Windows for design and dev when it's clearly inferior

Most of the new users of linux boast everything they new even when they yet know bash scripting, sed and awk. I've been part of a distro development myself and we get to have the impression of these type of switchers. I like the enthusiasm alex but you gotta slow down, you can't convince anyone on your own.

I still believe windows will stay above the competition. The wine really s**ks when I tried to install some software like mt4 for forex.

 

Appreciate your input but this time you ranted for nothing .

The sequence : p,o,enter,enter isn't a p+o+enter+enter. The code hinting works just like auto complete and it's instant. There are no shortcuts to remember. The code hinting feature is just another time saving tool for me , however you still get to type plenty of words by hand it's just nice that it is there especially when using the AIR JS library and it's loooong names . The fact that I type looking only at the screen might be a big plus for me .

Thanks for the IBM article , it something every dam dev should know.

 

... and involves looking at the screen to be sure it's auto-completing what you want; which for me 99% of the time is wrong... which is why I lump it alongside keyboard shortcuts -- in a way it's WORSE, because it's usually inconsistent/unpredictable just what line-after-line in your code you'll end up using. LOVELY when the result of typing the same characters results in different code!

But then, I hate auto-complete because whenever I tried using it I spent more time fixing when it didn't do what I wanted it to do than I did actually writing code.

There are a lot of 'tools' to 'help' coding that to me just get in the way or make it harder -- auto-completion, auto-closing tags, colour syntax highlighting, tabbed editors -- to me they're all useless trash that make it HARDER to work with, not easier.

Which is not to say I don't like all the extra bits good editors have -- matching indents on word-wrap, indent indicators, long line guide rules (I like 72 column), indent rules, brace matching, block indentation/deindentation, regex search/replace... You know, the useful stuff.

Having it incorrectly try to predict what I'm about to type and turning it into an illegible acid trip of colours? Not so much.

 

I don't care with "native shell environment" I don't need all of them

 

Visual Studio is a very large program and when you don't use most of the features can be considered bloaty, but I use it and like Apocalypse I appreciate the auto complete feature it has.

I can honestly say it nearly always predicts my class, method or variable name correctly. In fact, "prediction" is quite a misnomer, it doesn't actually predict anything. It just looks through what you've already used as identifiers and applies it on the fly taking nearby data types and logic in to play. Even when the IDE doesn't suggest the correct identifier it's because I've used it for other things too (like a delegate method as well as variable, for example) so all I then have to do is hit the down key to choose the variable instead of the method, for instance. I'm usually highly critical of things that effectively allow the programmer to be lazy, but this isn't bad at all.

I'm definitely not one for shortcuts. The only ones I use are ctrl+c/ctrl+v, ctrl+z/ctrl+y and ctrl+f which I'm certain everyone here knows what are (for Mac think apple cmd key instead of ctrl).

 

The thing is in Dreamweaver only the list of options appears as I type , the list gets shorter as I input more chars but it doesn't hinder me it does two things for me :
- helps me save time ;
- helps me by remembering long commands for the AIR library;
Since CS5.5 this feature really works nicely.

Visual Studio is even better since it also remembers variable names and function names . If find that refreshing when coding for scratch and invaluable when fixing or improving someone else's code.

I coded with Notepad++ for a few days due to an expired license , it took me a bit more time to get things done. I almost never look at the keyboard . It's just how i work with computers . Maybe that's why features like these work for me while they annoy the living hell out of you. I know one thing , I'll use every advantage i can to save time. Hell if tomorrow some creates a decent voice-to-code AI I'll be one of the first people to use it.

 

Two things you couldn't pay me to work with.

Oh wait, make that three; you couldn't even pay me to INSTALL an Adobe product since the CS versions came along, what with all the crapplets and pre-launcer idiocy that basically hijacks the HOST OS to make EVERYTHING run like crap and crash every five minutes, in the name of making Adobe products run "faster".

While the IDE in visual studio, and most 'modern' IDE's just piss me off to no end -- to the point of "for **** sake, just let me type in my blasted code". Though it could be worse, have you tried the pathetic pile of manure of a IDE for the Arduino? Utterly useless because it lacks the functionality even regular old fashioned notepad provides... thankfully you can just set it to 'use external editor' and it will reload every time you hit compile; thing SERIOUSLY needs a command line version, but being it a crappy java based wrapper (hence the useless fixed size text and horrible UI) for WinAVR (which is in itself a crappy wrapper around g++) that's overly reliant on custom make files (make files -- combined with header files one of the reasons I always feel the need to bitch-slap people who like C), doing that's an even bigger pain in the arse.

Which actually brings it back on topic in a way -- command line compilers... I use them all the time... in Windows. A real copy of Visual Studio provides it (good for a laugh), FPC provides it, I can even run gcc/g++ from there.

I rarely look at the keyboard OR the screen while typing, so... I find that stuff takes longer for me to use, so it doesn't save time or provide any advantage; but we're all different, YMMV. Having to look, constantly changing what it's saying and hoping what I want actually comes up takes more time than just typing what I want.

Plan on a long, LONG, LONG wait on that one. For over three decades I've watched media 'experts' claim it's "just around the corner" and marketing twits for the likes of Apple and IBM claim "it's here" when none of it works worth a flying purple fish. Given that two people in the same room speaking the same language have a 1 in 6 chance of misunderstanding each-other, don't plan on computers being able to handle true and proper speech recognition any time over the next 50 years, at least not without the result being akin to the incomprehensible gibberish people use when "texting" or in "tweets". (which is a contributor to my having zero interest in using either).

 

Trust me I hate working with AIR and DW just as much but my hatred for them is far smaller then my hatred for Java therefore I'll keep using AIR .

There are plenty of awful IDEs and I really don't want to try them all. I have enough of a hard time dealing with DW , VS and Eclipse.

As for voice recognition , ya I know they fail miserably no matter how much you train the local AI. IDK where the frak they are testing them , probably in a sound proof room because in real life they fail and they fail hard . I've been trying to get Dragon NaturallySpeaking to serve me year after year and instead of doing that it went out for tea.