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One of my most nagging questions when it comes to development is: To IDE or not to IDE?

On one hand, I greatly enjoy the hands on total control of developing with nothing but a text editor (no less than the amazing VIM) and a bunch of shell windows. Everything definitely does What I Want And Nothing Else.

However, sometimes development can become tedious and the tools available in a fine IDE can make a huge difference in the productivity that a sole developer can achieve. For instance, when I was developing on QCVS 2 I used PHPEclipse for a good while in hopes that the WYSIWYG html editing would save me some time. However, regardless of how good the features on an IDE can be, I always pine for the amazing text editing power of VIM.

So I was more than just a little bit stunned when I ran across PIDA (Python Integrated Development Application). It’s an IDE that is written in Python and rather than providing new implementations of existing tools, simply embeds those tools together to form the IDE. I haven’t worked with it much, but so far I’m hugely impressed with the VIM integration.

If this truely works out to be an IDE that provides all of the ease-of-use-timesavers that I crave from full IDEs with the same glory of text editing power of VIM, I could be in love.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 1:06 pm and is filed under , Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.