devblog.brahmancreations.com

I have been dabbling in some of the new frameworks, a bit of symfony and a bit of rails, and one thing that hampers productivity is always having to navigate directories when switching between models, views, controllers and the like. You get a bit of that with Drupal, although in its case you are usually switching between your themes and custom modules. So many directories to be switching among all the time.

One of the complaints made by newcomers to frameworks like symfony and rails are their directory structures, and although rails is say no by default, symfony offers the ability to change the directory structure to your preference.

I was assessing symfony and moving around the directories on the command line I realized it is much easier to launch a file from the command line even when the file is already open in the editor, than tab though the editor to locate it, something you notice in rails videos. Microsoft should really consider the option of getting Windows to search through the top folders in Program Files if they are not on the path.

This solves the problem of switching to/launching files quickly in the editor from the dos prompt.
The next problem is having to switch through directories --> having many command windows open --> desktop too cluttered.

The solution I have in mind in Windows are combination of WinTabber or Console with Far Manager.

Notepad++ with its portable incarnation Notepad++ Portable is my preferred editor on Windows now. WinTabber allows any program on the screen to be placed within its main window in tab, whereas Console launches the consoles within its tabs. They both allow the panels to be renamed.

Far Manager is the key player in the scheme, it is like Norton Commander or Midnight Commander. It is keyboard driven and allows the launching of a file with a single key press. As there are 4 keys assigned to shortcuts on files, it is really useful. It has recently been open sourced so we should be seeing more in the not too distant future.

What facilities do the major IDEs, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ etc have for avoiding this shuffling?

Keyboard driven only.