(not) An IDE that goes straight to the point

I don't use IDEs. They're slow to start, they eat up a lot of RAM, they try to hide my files away from me and make something magic out of them. They just seem to stand in the way.

Eclipse/Netbeans/other might be good at managing your projects and having everything compile without you precisely knowing how nor why, but they just suck at inputing text. They suck because they believe that inputing text is, well, 'just inputing text'.

They provide you with built-in menus to control every aspect of your development process. Well, actually not quite, because you'll always need another one should you work on some exotic project. So you resort to plugins making the whole thing even heavier while you don't even use half of the functionalities available.

However I sincerely believe that they do capture something. Writing software is not just about typing code. It's about organizing various files and managing the way they interact with one another. I recently noticed that I've grown to always use the same pattern when I work (whether on professional or personal projects, even on my blog !):

1. I edit the code with the editor I like because the way you input code matters
2. I usually leave a terminal open at the root of the project because it's always handy and even if some editors provide you with a shell that's not what they were built for
3. I'm not a hardcore one and so I often indulge myself in a file manager window — what it really provide is a sort of permanent-visual-ls of my project and sometime I use it to go fetch a file a little further on the system

RawIDE tries to do just that. It lets you open your text editor because, hell, who am I to tell you which editor you should use ? You're a grown woman/man/other. It opens your favourite file manager and a shell at the root of your project because it's always nice to have them. And that's it.

That's it. Enjoy