They say Stanford is a top university for CS, but the facilities here really don't bear that out. The main student developement machines run _Solaris_. That's right. Ugh. I'm writing some pretty complicated programs for my graduate AI class and writing code in emacs is driving me crazy - I usually write code with Visual Studio in Windows. Typing code into a text editor, hand-editting makefiles, and using the godawful ddd debugger makes me feel like I'm back in the 1980s. What kinds of tools do professional Unix developers use? Are there any that look and act just like Visual Studio? I'm going crazy...

I'm more of a vim man myself. Seriously, though. Once you pass the inital learning curve, it's fairly easy to do without a pretty GUI. There are people that are many times more productive in Emacs than in Visual Studio; it's just a matter of taking time to learn to use the software the way it was meant to be used. Emacs is way more than a text editor; also works as a fairly full-blown IDE.

This might be worth a read: Emacs @ Wikipedia

That said, there should be a graphical debugger called dbx depending on what dev tools package they have installed.

Quote: Original post by igni ferroque
Emacs is way more than a text editor; also works as a fairly full-blown IDE.

More like an operating system am i rite

Quote: Original post by Leffe

Quote: Original post by igni ferroque
Emacs is way more than a text editor; also works as a fairly full-blown IDE.

More like an operating system am i rite

Hey! Hey! This is gdnet, not that other place. So kill it with fire, sir.

Ahem.

Solaris isn't bad, and most unix developers do write with emacs or vi. I personally use gedit, but whatever.

Hey Null and Void, any chance for a FAQ entry?

Q: Blah Blah Blah Visual Studio Blah Blah Blah?
A: Try KDevelop, Anjuta, DevStudio (or whatever is was), or learn to love emacs or vi and makefiles or automake. For large projects, IDEs just aren't options.

EDIT: Aw heck, it IS in the FAQ!

Quote: Solaris isn't bad

Yeah, it's probably one of the most stable and refined operating systems out there.

Quote: Original post by C-Junkie
Hey! Hey! This is gdnet, not that other place. So kill it with fire, sir.

Which other place, Poland :X?

And the Solaris servers at my school haven't got any C compilers... (at least not cc or gcc, any other suggestions) I can't really blame them though, I wouldn't want people compiling things all day on my server.

we also had solaris at university, and man, i really tought it sucked. now i think it's cool :)

the problem is usually that

1. it's so different from windows

2. the default desktop installation is horrible - large ugly fonts, CDE, no comfortable bash environment, just vi instead of vim etc.

if i was you i'd look for someone (an instructor or an experienced student) who's comfortable with solaris; try to set up a good bash environment (i.e. colored output of ls, syntax highlighting for g++ errors), then get to know either emacs or vi (i prefer vi) and read a tutorial about makefiles, and you should be prepared. and gdb is great for debugging, if you know the 5 basic commands (break, run, attach, bt, print).

i needed about 2 months getting used to vi, but then working with vi was faster and more comfortable then using visual studio.

The solaris workstations I use for my course have CDE and gnome (though something else is used by default, probably twm), and they have vim and bash, so I guess it's a matter of how uptodate things are (and also extra software installed by the sys admin, but apparently sun are going phase out CDE and use gnome instead, so at least gnome is there because sun put it there)

If you want to learn how to use vim, then try running vimtutor (if that doesn't work then you probably have to do something like run vim and do :help tutor), vim also comes with a lot of other documentation and a reference guide

There are IDEs for linux, (kdevelop, anjuta, eclipse etc), I don't know how many of them run on solaris though (but the next release of solaris should, in theory, be able to run all linux apps)

The CS department here also uses solaris on the servers, and in our CS lab. Although, depending on what language you are coding for, there are plenty of development tools available. For Java, there is eclipse, JBuilder, Netbeans, and probably others. For C++, there is also C++ BuilderX, there is also anjuta, which is fairly nice. Hopefully this thread is useful to you, although I think at least some professional UNIX coders do exactly the process you describe. I know I have for past projects.

It is definitely true that visual studio is easier for someone to learn.

But here's why I prefer emacs to visual studio. Programming is something I spend many hours doing. The slope of the learning curve is not nearly as important to me as other things -- for example how quickly I can get work done and how much I can customize my environment to work with me.

Having a programmable editor/environment like emacs is far more important to me than being able to point and click to compile (which you of course can have emacs do if you want, but I find the less time my hands are off the keyboard the faster I work).