What are some of the things you hate about your favorite editor/IDE?

Question

Similar to What are five things you hate about your favorite language? Name some things that annoy or infuriate you about your favorite editor/IDE. No bashing other editors/IDEs. It has to be your current favorite editor/IDE.

Answer 1

It can't write code by itself.

Answer 2

Visual Studio:

Intellisense sometimes doesn't work (doesn't want to show a dropdown menu) even though it should. This happens in particular when you have just created a class and are trying to access members to an instance of that class. I guess it just doesn't parse the header files sometimes.

Answer 3

VisualStudio doesn't have vi/vim key bindings.

Answer 4

Visual Studio (2008)'s visual editor for web applications has found it necessary to apply all styling changes to generic CSS classes ("Style1", etc.) instead of the messy in-line style tag way it used to. I didn't use it much, but when I made the switch from 2005 to 2008 the change was pretty jarring.

The inability to select multiple controls at once through the visual editor at one time as well (for moving around the page or changing some style information) was a pain in the butt as well.

Answer 5

I still used Visual C++ 6.0 as my main IDE, ancient though it is, it has many advantages in my context over later VS releases. What I don't like about it, that was added in later versions, is a lack of search and replace across all the files in the project. (I keep VS2005 running in the background for this).

Answer 6

The sudden freezes in Visual Studio are the most annoying. In terms of breaking concentration, they are almost as bad as a phone call or browsing StackOverflow.

Answer 7

In eclipse : the J2EE module dependencies is ugly (no difference between compilation dependencies and runtime dependencies), the worst happened when updating the version (to eclipse 3.4) the functionality just don't work (something in the projects metadata I didn't manage to fix). I replaced all by ant scripts :p

Answer 8

Eclipse gets very annoying when it doesn't have a network connection. You can't customize very much the tool bar. Can't add files to cvsignore after you have first committed a project.

Answer 9

NetBeans 6.5:

I cannot figure out how to refactor name of methods/fields/locals.

(I hope somneone here knows)

Answer 10

Vim's perfection makes me feel inadequate.

Answer 11

SciTE: well, it is open source and I contributed quite a bit of code to it, whenever I was annoyed by some behavior. So now, it is my favorite editor for a reason! ;-) And there is little left that is annoying...

Now, spell checking would be nice to have...

Answer 12

Speed.

From my experience using several versions of Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and JBuilder the performance of the tools is depressing when doing even mundane things like entering text into a source file. I need instant response when typing in my IDE. For C++/C# code I've fallen back to emacs for responsiveness/performance reasons.

Answer 13

emacs: startup is slow

Answer 14

emacs: when you unmaximize and remaximize it, the subwindows change size

Answer 15

I don't use a real ide, instead my environment is the union of Notepad++, git-gui and a bash prompt. Bash is a darling.

git-gui will show you the diffs in what looks like a nice text editor, but it would be swell if you could actually edit files right there, instead of finding and opening them in another program.

Answer 16

We have a project with a lot of JSPs and other resources in IntelliJ. Hitting "Open Resource" (CTRL+Shit+N) sometimes takes minutes before the resource opens... It drives me crazy...

But apart from that I really don't wanna miss IntelliJ ;-)

Answer 17

notepad++: block commenting/uncommenting works only if part of a line selected. so, there is no way to toggle commenting of a current line w/o selection.
progressively reducing number of useful plugins shipped with the main editor.

Answer 18

Visual Source Safe Integration

Answer 19

My favorite IDE is IntelliJ. What I hate about it is the random "freezes". It doesn't crash, and it's generally really fast for searching and stuff, but every now and then, it just freezes for 10 seconds, which is really annoying. I've changed the vmoptions to give it tons of memory, but it still happens.

As for my favorite non-IDE editor in linux, emacs, I wish I could "drill down" into methods and classes with it. Other than that, it's pretty solid though. In windows, my favorite non-IDE editor is notepad++. I pretty much have the same complaint with it as I have with emacs.

Answer 20

Eclipse:

• Random crashes while building with Ant.

• High RAM usage

• Not being able to change the color of the "folding" bar. This is really annoying because I have everything else changed to darker colors, leaving a white vertical bar that sticks out in the middle of my screen.

Answer 21

NetBeans: There is no way to turn on word wrap in the editor window. Yeah, it's been a feature request in the issue tracker for a long, long time now. Supposedly version 7.0 will have it.

Answer 22

Notepad++:

• lack of builtin support for code snippets for html
• ANSI is the default mode for files without a BOM (UTF-8 should be the default IMO)
• lack of proper code completion (but then again, it's a text editor, not an IDE, but, it is my favorite, and I do hate this thing about it!)
• poor support for bidirectional text (right-to-left mixed inside left-to-right text)
• the default colors for most languages suck!
• the UI looks a bit lame, gives a first impression of immaturity!
• the official website's design sucks!

Answer 23

Eclipse not yet support all languages at the same time in the same way. Then I have to use VS.NET for C#, with total another keybinding and short keys.

Eclipse: You cannot open a editor for a new file, before saved the file in the workspace.

Eclipse: Drag-and-drop files from/to 3rd-party application not always working. (e.g. drag files from 7z to workspace directly)

Answer 24

Visual Studio has an Add Variable dialog for adding control variables in MFC applications. Great... except it's dog slow and can only add one variable at a time, then you have to close and re-open it. Pathetic. It's been like that for every version of VS.Net, ever since the first. Fortunately our MFC applications are maintained with VC6 - a 10+ year old product that is still markedly superior for MFC work.

Answer 25

Every time I think I'm finally getting good at Vim, I find something new in it which makes me feel like an idiot. This week was finding out I can apply a :substitute to a * by leaving the search regex blank.

Answer 26

NetBeans (Not my favorite IDE but one of them)

The task list will scan forever on a large PHP project. And when it ends it will scan again. And whenever I open NetBeans again it will scan again. And the IDE becomes unusable until I disable the plugin.

I should be able to disable scanning of some folders like I do in Eclipse.

Answer 27

Netbeans - Quite slow after hours of use.

Notepad++ - My current default editor. Cannot automatically add a default extension to files you save.
FTP feature is quite annoying sometimes, like when you try to "refresh" the contents of a directory in your site and then nothing happens. It won't show up the contents of the directory anymore like as if its currently empty. You have to refesh it a lot of times before it properly shows up the contents.

Answer 28

TextMate can't quickly jump to the definition of an active symbol.

Answer 29

Visual Studio

No decent clipboard where I can copy and paste multiple items using keyboard shortcuts. That's why I use ClipX.

Answer 30

Scite: it crashes too much (possibly due to large files).

Update: Upgrading to a more recent version (as opposed to to what was bundled with ruby) fixed this.

Answer 31

Eclipse: I have to use it at work (I prefer JEdit), however:

• It's not a very powerful editor. It can't record macros, perform operations on all matching lines, easily convert case, let you copy the name of the file, or execute programs on the lines (eg bsh scripts) like JEdit can.
• All of the line markers occupy the same spot in the gutter, so the program pointer covers up bookmarks covers up break points covers up annotation marks.
• The build process is largely opaque and very hard to copy from one machine to another, as it tends to prefer absolute rather than relative paths. While it's possible to get it to build using an Ant script (rather than creating a project from an Ant script, which won't change as the Ant script does), it's rather hard.
• It doesn't store its context or configuration until you properly exit, so when it crashes every hour or so, you lose your current configuration
• It sometimes has problems finding the source for methods right in the same file while debugging. Pressing F3 brings you there, but going jumping into the call brings you to the "no source..." page

Is that enough?

Answer 32

Visual Studio

• No Intellisense for MarkupExtensions
• Too many crashes with the WPF Designer! (Blend is even worse!) :(

Answer 33

Visual studio 2005/2008

Annoying Add Reference dialog

I hate this. Whenever you want to add new assembly reference to your .net project, by default the dialog lists all .net assemblies from GAC. Moreover this is not asynchronous so you have to wait till the entire list is populated. Yet worse it is not cached so everytime you open up the add reference dialog it does the same thing and annoys you like anything.

I read a post on ScottGu's blog that claims they have resolved this in vs2010. I'm waiting for this.