[REBOL] Re: Visual editor or IDE for Rebol
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 9-Sep-2002 0:28
Hi Jim,
<< I'm currently learning Rebol and I am about to start my first
application.
Can anyone suggest a good Visual editor or IDE for Rebol that runs on
Windows 2000? I have been using Visual Studio since its first beta and
would prefer and equally intuitive editor/IDE. >>
There is no "IDE" for REBOL available at this time. Everyone likes different
editors, and you should get some good responses here about different ones to
try. There are a number of projects people have started which are headed in
that direction but, perhaps strangely, while it's pretty easy to build some
of those tools (e.g. a GUI layout tool) in REBOL itself, many of those
projects fade away because modeling things on how other tools work often
doesn't translate well into REBOL. I.e. they end up being harder to use than
the "raw" alternative.
As an example, I built a little prototype that does for REBOL what
Intellisense does in the VS IDE (as pioneered in VB). It's a simple
prototype, but functional, supporting both pop-up lists of object properties
and syntax help for functions. In VB (my previous environment), those
features became indispensible, and I probably wouldn't mind having them on
hand for REBOL, but I haven't missed them all that much, which was a big
surprise to me! I went all the way from QB4 to VB1 through VB6, and always
loved what the IDE gave me, feature wise. I do miss Shift+F2 though. :(
Anyway, I use ConTEXT for most of my REBOL editing, and it does a fine job.
In the REBOL console you have "tab completion" of known words which is kind
of like Intellisense, but I very rarely even use that. The way I write in
REBOL is totally different from the way I wrote BASIC (QB/VB) code. I've
only been with it for a year, but I'm anxious to see how my style evolves.
As far as what's intuitive, hey, just try some different approaches and
tools and see what works best for you. See how simple you can keep things.
Much of REBOL is about simplicity. As many folks say, there is a certain
zen
quality to really elegant REBOL code, and I think that carries over
into how we produce that code, in both the thought/creative/problem-solving
and construction aspects.
Best of luck, and happy REBOLing!
--Gregg
