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Ask HN: Current Development Tool Choices

3 points by kristopolous ↗ HN
I've been doing dev primarily on Linux since the late 90s. However, I feel like I've accumulated more historical legacy than useful flow.

I've wanted to retool and increase my productivity for some time now, but it's been difficult for me to commit to a new way when the old marginally suffices. It's time for a new attitude!

What tools do you use, especially those which have come on scene in the past 0-10 years, which has really changed how you develop.

Also, what workflow or set of tools have you sworn off as a bad habit and why?

Thanks!

2 comments

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r_transpose_p
I am primarily a C++ developer. I used to alternate between emacs and eclipse depending on whether I needed IDE functionality or not (you can argue about whether one "needs" an IDE, but when browsing unfamiliar code, "find where this function is used" or "go to where this function is defined" are incredibly useful, and grep doesn't always cut it).

Then a coworker introduced me to this thing called "rtags". You run a daemon that understands clang and (some set of build tools) and it handles your IDE functionality for C++. You then get the right rtags plugin for your particular editor, and use that to glue your rtags to whatever editor you use.

I still use emacs for this, but I am actively looking at the family of more modern emacs-inspired editors, such as sublime, and atom, that represent newer iterations on the old idea of a simple GUI editor with a rich extensible scripting environment.

I am very excited about the idea of a future in which your "IDE" isn't a standalone monolithic piece of software, but something you cobble together out good, minimalist, scriptable editor and a grab bag of services and plugins. I'm almost wondering whether things like Eclipse and Visual Studio actually look a lot like this concept if one looks "under the hood"

I am idly curious, by the way, about things that are like rtags, but for statically-typed languages other than C++.