Blogging Ottinger (tim)MonoDevelop 0.14 in Ubuntu
C# gets bigger all the time, and the Mono team (mOh-nOh as in “monkey”, not mono as in “one”) have been doing a great job of bringing the language and platform into use in the Linux world. Banshee, Beagle, and FSpot are quite popular Mono applications, among an impressive and growing set of open-source applications
I will admit that I’m spoiled. I’ve worked in eclipse, and I’ve worked in VS.NET with Resharper, and I have worked in Python and C++ and other languages using make-integrated and macro-enriched vim setups. I have been pretty productive in those environments. I have also looked at MonoDevelop one time before, and thought that I should take another glance. The nature of my spoiled-ness came out in my complaints about MonoDevelop. Its biggest problems may be that we’re used to much more than it can offer… so far.
There are people in the world productively using mono, and I use some mono-based software every day (Tomboy notes, among others). I think these apps work well and look very good. I assume that they’re being developed in MonoDevelop, though I don’ t know it for sure. Most of my complaints are about features present in Eclipse or VisualStudio.NET+Resharper that I would really like to see, and of course those are both mature systems. There is also the likelihood that MonoDevelop developers have different productive habits than I have, and I’m just unhappy because it doesn’t fit my personal style whilst all the time glossing over the things that it does supremely well.
Ubuntu at this time supports the barely-usable version 0.14.
Here are some loves and hates with 0.14:
| I Love | I Hate |
|---|---|
| Code completion works well and is obvious. This is a basic deal maker/breaker fora modern, statically-typed language. | Having to save, build, and run tests as three steps. I do this a few times per minute, so it gets old quick. I need infinitest for C#, or for monodevelop to build & run tests automagically. |
| Snippets support works well, and is easily customizable. | No hotkey list anywhere that I can see. You have the tips in the menues, and the guts to go around pressing weird combinations: “I wonder what control-alt-pageup does?” |
| Mouse editing works well. It looks like they planned this part well. Sadly I don’t use my mouse except when I *have* to. | No code reformatter, so when I mouse-paste on character too far to the right, I have to mouse over and type space instead of letting the editor fix it. |
| Takes care of building apps for you - no makefile finagling. This might be the only reason I use it instead of VIM. I’ll learn the command line and try it using vim and let you know how the experience relates. Vim also doesn’t have refactoring, so it should be a fair comparison. | No hotkey for deleting a whole line at a time, and no equivalent of alt-up and alt-down to move sections of code around in eclipse. Deleting a whole line tends to be a series of backspaces, some careful mousing and keystroking, or the dreaded home, shift-end, backspace, backspace trick. |
| Add-in manager is easy to use. | The add-in manager is only easy to use if you know what site will provide your packages, and the packages are self-contained. Sadly there isn’t package management, so you have to find and install all the package prerequisites by hand. |
| Autoindent actually works. I thought it didn’t at one time, but it was just perception. Leave off a semicolon and you’ll find yourself indented as a line continuation. It’s fine, and works. | If you don’t have the error tab opened then you don’t see compile errors. The unit test tab shows the old test results. There should be integration so that saving will build and test, or that testing will save and build, or something. But not knowing that your build didn’t really work is very annoying. |
| Crashes. Especially when setting up plugins, but generally too. | |
| What refactoring support? | |
| Hotkey and menu option to comment and uncomment don’t work. | |
| If you click at the start of a line to highlight it and press “delete”, it will blank the line instead of deleting it. Why? I’ve no idea. | |
| Edit/CommentLine doesn’t work, either by the menu nor the hotkey. | |
| The “advanced editing” features are to uppercase or lowercase a selected box. ADVANCED? |
I’m now looking for a nice ubuntu repo for the 0.1rc1, recently released. I am looking forward to a much better user experience and much more comprehensive editing support.
0.14 is ancient. MonoDevelop 1.0 RC1 has just been released, you might wanna try that.
Comment by Ankit — 2008-February-17 @ 01:00
Oops, I just saw the last line of your post
Comment by Ankit — 2008-February-17 @ 01:02