Can I just rant at you for a minute, gentle reader?
The editor in Visual Studio is from the stone ages. Really – it’s retarded (I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – it really is retarded).
Sure, it does syntax highlighting, but really….so do the little code-paste tools like pastebin, and those little tools highlight for dozens of languages, so color me unimpressed.
Intellisense? Yup – very nifty, very advanced – oh, wait! Lisp environments have been doing “intellisense” for years decades.
What else….let’s see….feature or failure?
| Visual Studio characteristic | Feature/Failure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| consistency of indentation | FAIL | ever tried to use another editor to open files authored in Visual Studio? |
| efficient keyboard shortcuts | FAIL | the most often used shortcuts (navigation in text, for example) require me to move my hand off the home row |
| automatic indentation | FAIL | Are you kidding? Only if you happen to be typing in a magical combination of keystrokes that Microsoft decided was the one true way to type will auto-indentation be convenient. |
These are just some very basic, fundamental things, and this list could go on – indeed, I might come back and add to it as I become more proficient with Visual Studio. As an experienced Emacs user, it’s quite painful. I tried to use the Emacs keyboard mode, but it was even more maddening than the other modes – they get the keystrokes wrong, and even when they get them right, they don’t work correctly! C-k is supposed to kill a line, but you have to type ‘k’ twice for the kill to happen, and if you try to yank it back in using C-y, you get the killed line twice! M-q doesn’t work, you don’t get registers, typing on top of a highlighted region doesn’t replace, it appends, and ‘C-x b’ doesn’t switch tabs in the editor.
For all the wonders of a modern IDE, can we just please, please have an editor that’s advanced past 1985?