[Qt-creator] QtCreator and VI

[Andre Poenitz]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 10:12:55AM -0700, Chris wrote:
> So far I have done the vast majority of my Qt development with good
> ol' vim and a command prompt.  I've tried using Eclipse and various
> other IDEs but for my personal tastes I simply can't give up the text
> editing features vim gives me for the features of an IDE.  So my
> question/feedback is, what will/does Qt Creator do for me as a coder
> who detests ever having to lift my hand from the keyboard under any
> circumstances? This includes having to move my hand just to move the
> cursor by using the arrow keys (an extremely frequent operation) which
> drives me absolutely nuts. I remember reading in one of the TT posts
> about Qt Creator that you guys use vim a lot in house, and so I'm
> curious what features of Creator will allow a die-hard VI user such as
> myself and a good number of people I work with to convert?

Well, I consider myself a vim user. Probably not "die-hard", but it's
basically the thing that I learned to hate and love (in that order...)
in 1993. I've used a few other editors since then, too, but when given a
choice I use vim. Right now for instance.

So why do I use Creator?

1. Navigation within bigger projects using "Quick Open" is _a lot_
faster compared to what I usually do on the commandline using a few
handcrafted macros, scripts, ctags and vim.

It's actually so fast that I already felt compelled to use Creator when
pair programming with one of the ... erm ... younger colleagues (don't
we have euphemisms for that?) just trying to keep the impression that I
can jump around in a project at a rate he'd consider sort-of-acceptable
;-}

Navigation within a file is "obviously" slower than when using vim, but
that's offset by saving keystrokes when actually typing code due to
code completion and quicker access to the Qt docs.

2. There's this debugger thing. I am much better at determining whether
a QStringList contains what I expect when it is presented as a flat list
with one string per line as opposed to having the same thing displayed
as a couple of QListData::Data pointers...

Andre'

PS: If this weren't my spare time I would have sent this with a
@trolltech address...

PPS: In case you wonder why I don't use Creator exclusively (apart from
the obvious "It's not vim", "It doesn't make coffee" and "habits are
hard to change":

1. I often have five-lines throw-away "projects" for testing stuff.
That's for me still quicker with a few aliases.

2. Large scale search and replace. The refactoring is still missing...