Need to Develop

I have been isolated for quite some time now and a friend has been pushing me to go out and do something. Over email I suggested that we have - what used to be - our customary morning coffee at Timmies.

Now, Gmail has been a wonderful web-based email client. It is snappy enough and even advanced things, like sorting incoming mail, has not been any hassle. Actually, the best asset is the superb spam filter. I rarely think about it, though, because there is no spam in my inbox, ever.

In the message to my friend I asked "maybe we can go for coffees tomorrow morning?" Gmail evidently processed the whole message, including that quote, and found an interesting match: "coffees tomorrow morning?" Ah ha, thought Gmail, my buddy Google Calendar would like that. Let's prompt the user to see if they want to add a "coffees morning?" event to their calendar on tomorrow's date!

Is this brilliant software design or somewhat invasive? Sure, it wasn't sentient enough to understand that a more appropriate title would have been "morning coffees", or that a coffee morning should not default to an all-day event. But having software infer what I am trying to do with such coherence came so unexpectedly that it just felt bizarre.

When the computer makes assumptions about things we do not care or think about, nothing seems out of the ordinary. When the computer figures out what we want to do next, not only is it convenient but you also may be fooled into thinking you are dealing with something intelligent.

When I get programming the following trend can be observed.

Time of interest: at this moment I have become stumped over an issue I could have probably left until later. After XChat and multiple Firefox windows are open, taking up a desktop themselves, it just progressively gets worse as I dive into library source code and download-only docs and multiple file system searches with the GUI tool because I suck at the find command... A hundred various windows, memory spilling into the swap space, and a diet coke later I have either given up or found the answer.

Unfortunately, Geany does not fix any of that. I'll probably always make a rat's nest when I am working on code. Er, that is, my code is elegant and clean but the process isn't... in comparison anyhow. What Geany does do, though, that I absolutely love, is the following three things.

• Loads fast. While drowning in windows I often make the attempt to temporarily give myself some breathing room by closing windows that I only think I am done with. When I tried Eclipse it was a disaster because I'd be shuffling through windows and accidentally close my last Eclipse window which meant I'd have to load it again. Eclipse is a heavy IDE. It takes forever to load. Geany is a very light IDE. It pops up within two seconds.
• Simple. I do not hate feature-heavy IDE's or tricky ones to get used to like vim. They are just not for me. Maybe one day I will spend a few weeks getting comfortable with a particular application. Until that day, though, I need an IDE that I can just take a glance at and understand.
• Has the essentials. Syntax highlighting, symbol recognition, code folding and more, it is mostly there. I am still waiting for a tree-view directory browser, though. Maybe when I finally figure out C I can do that for them.

So there you have it: my IDE of choice. It runs almost anywhere so if you want to take it for a spin you should be able to. If you did not catch the link yet it is: http://geany.org.

Version 0.16 is out now and I haven't upgraded. Getting on that now... I'll probably grab another diet coke while I do that. Yeah, that's right, diet. It tastes better. I swear.