General developer forum

I use vim and Firefox     It's not what you've got but how you set it up.

Just in case it's interesting, this is the screen of my Windows box just now.

Hi!

On Windows I am using:

• TotalCommander for regex searching
• PSPad editor
• Eclipse + Xored PHP IDE
  
• Tortoise CVS
• ExamDiff
• Firefox (Web Developer Toolbar), IE and Opera

When in linux/BSD:

• Eclipse + Xored PHP IDE
• vi
• Firefox, Links
  

I am considering full migration to *nix just now - FreeBSD or Gentoo

Hi,

I work on windows with

_ PersonalBrain to visually organize files and other stuff
_ TopStyle Pro for XHTML and CSS
_ Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar for development
_ Firefox JavaScript Debugger for JS
_ MSIE and Opera for testing
_ Xampp for my local Moodle installation
_ Skype and TheBat! (e-mail) to keep my work synchronized over the world

And this is how my screen looks like in the moment:

Oh, well. Everyone is using cool tools, I think mine are simple, if not lame. Let's see...

The desktop is a powerbook running MacOSX dual-monitor (the laptop's monitor + an external LCD) doing screen panning. The additional 'space' is a huge productivity boost for me personally. I also use a Dell desktop machine as a dev server, running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sarge'.

The mac is usually running Mozilla for mail and webbrowsing, plus Firefox, Safari and Dillo. I use the 3 browsers to have different sessions (student/teacher/admin) when I'm testing stuff. On Mozilla/Firefox, the developer extensions are used and abused abundantly. Each browser has about 12 tabs open at any different time and 1/3 of those tabs are Google searches ;)

(web-based tool recount: Google Gmail Moodle GForge WRMS)

I use Terminal.app and X11.app a lot, to do stuff on the local Mac, on the dev server or on the production servers. ssh, X11 over ssh, key forwarding, etc. For coding I use emacs over X11 (but not xemacs). I used to use Eclipse with the PHP and Perl extensions a lot, but Eclipse is way too slow and somewhat unstable on OSX. So slow that emacs feels blazing fast!

(Part of my emacs reconversion comes from working with Penny ;)

On the terminal windows, I'm usually tailing logfiles, grepping (grep and pcregrep), using cvs and tla, running top, sar vmstat, and other utilities. bash autocompletion is my saviour. I'd say most of my time is spent tapping away at terminal windows or on emacs. I do use vi in its many flavours when I am editing config files on servers -- I do a bit of shell/perl programming in vi as long as scripts are short... it drives me crazy when dealing with longer programs.

The dev machine runs Apache+PHP+MySQL+Postgres all from Debian packages. It also has a desktop UI using blackbox, but I rarely hook up a monitor to that machine. It's pretty powerful machine, and right now I'm giving it a workout, by running three simultaneous UML instances, testing a GForge install. It also has some chroot environments I use for Debian development.

I try to avoid keyboard/mouse switches, so I'm using keyboard shortcuts and navigations as much as possible. I really like the Cmd-Tab vs Cmd-` that OSX uses to switch apps or windows within an app.

So that's it. A lot of time working with the plumbing, very little drawing pretty pictures.

Mostly I use DreamweaverMX 2004, though I hate what Macromedia has done to the interface in the latest version (the designer who thought of automatic docking panels should be sentenced to work on a 286 for the rest of their natural lives!)--I like being able to do everything in one application. That, Tortoise, and SSH Secure shell are my  main development tools. I also use Photoshop for graphics and BB Flashback for doing screen recordings. Itunes (mostly for podcasts).

Then, mostly I'm planning things now which Jeff, Mark, Michael, and now Rob do the coding for, so I use alot of recylced paper and pencils to plan interfaces, db structures, etc. Also I use OneNote on my XP tablet for this (which results in less paper clutter and can actually recognize enough of my handwriting to make my notes searchable.

I have Firefox, IE, Netscape for testing things, and a Mac accross the room for video capture, testing Safari, and making mp3s out of old tapes.

Mark and Jeff have started using Textmate on iMacs, which rumor has it will someday soon acutally bring a visual CVS client to OSX.

Nothing too fancy:

• Firefox with several extensions (notably TabMix, WebDeveloper, Tidy)
• UltraEdit-32/Win. I 've never had to do serious development on a *nix box, mainly because there was always just one computer and at least one of those had to run Windows . UE's direct (S)FTP editing is a massive timesaver if the sources you 're editing are on another box, I 've lost count of how many times this feature has made my life easier.
  
• WinMerge for difficult diffing.
• EasyPHP. It's so easy it's ridiculous. I 've made a few command line utilities to enhance it, e.g. allowing me to easily switch between PHP 4 and 5.
• Command-line CVS and command-line grep whenever I need to find something in the source tree. After all these years, pure keyboard is still fastest.
• Pageant from the Putty tools to authenticate with SourceForge invisibly, otherwise for each CVS command you get to type in the passphrase you protected your private key with. Yuck.
  
• FooBar 2000 because I 'm always listening to music.

I have some screenshots with 20+ open tabs in Firefox and ~60 files open in UE (the tabs on the top were four rows deep), but I 'm exclusively using them to frighten small children.

Jon