I’ve been looking lately for a new IDE. I’ve been trying Project Builder, but it is not that great a development environment. It is really good for doing user interfaces. It needs some code completion action action and an easier way to get new files into projects. I miss my UltraEdit and plain old shell commands. I can get the shell on Mac OS X, but I’m looking for a good editor to work on multiple files and stuff. I’ve gotten so desperate as to try to learn Emacs again.

I was up late into the night trying to figure out how to get emacs to build on my OS X 10.2.8 environment. There were a couple of good pages from Andrew Choi about how to build from CVS. Unfortunately, gnu.org is under a cloud of paranoia and has restricted their CVS downloads to two versions: a snapshot from 3/19/03 and another that is the current version. The stable builds just keep reporting that they don’t know how to build for a powerpc-apple-darwin6.8 machine. This sucks. So, I downloaded the CVS versions and they don’t work either. I can configure the sources, but I can’t get the bootstrap to work. Stupid CVS builds… why can’t they make sure the tagged build works. At least they’re available. I did manage to find Emacs for Mac OS X that actually worked on my system here at mindlube software.

I also found one called subEthaEdit that lets multiple people edit the same document at the same time. I think that’s pretty useful. I wish I knew others who developed on a Mac that we could do pair programming on. However, I think that the idea of pair programming kind of means that two people looking at the same screen with only one keyboard, but I think that this stuff is more geared to collaborative development.

Hopefully I’ll find my new environment soon. I have code that wants to be written.