Power in simplicity

I’ve attended the 18th edition of Wurbe yesterday. For those of you that don’t know this, Wurbe is a periodical event that takes place in Bucharest, where developers meet to exchange ideas, share insights on latest technologies, promote best practices and talk about the daily activities that come up in a developer’s life.

This edition, the topic was “shaving seconds” – how to use automatic tools to replace the repetitive tasks that come up every day in the software development process. What editors, what tools, what scripts should we use to get our jobs done as fast as possible, while doing at least repetitive tasks as possible?

I usually use complicated IDEs, like Eclipse or Zend Studio, that consume a lot of resources, have thousands of features I don’t use nor need and that usually get in my way. Despite these obvious flaws, I still consider these IDEs to be the best in the branch, because “they can do” and “they also have”…stuff I don’t need. But today I’ve seen two presentations that made me reconsider my position. Two “ancient” and “obsolete” editors were presented: emacs by Alexandru Nedelcu and vim by Cristi Bălan. Well, in both cases, I doubt that any of my feature rich, RAM consuming, state of the art IDEs could ever allow me to achieve the same level of productivity those two had with their mid 70s editors. I’ve always considered vim and emacs to be stupider brothers of Windows Notepad. Well…I was wrong! Dead wrong!

I going to put some work into it and start to use emacs from now on, at least on my own projects…