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January 29, 2007
Just Discovered ActiveState's Komodo
I recently found out about the Komodo IDE and code editor applications from ActiveState. An older version of the Komodo IDE is mentioned in Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (full text of the book available from Informit) as an example of an application built on the Moz platform. But that's an older version, I thought... I should see what they're doing now. Well, what they're doing now is quite impressive.
The Komodo IDE isn't free, but their text editor (with syntax highlighting, code folding, and support for many many languages) is. I figured that if I'm going to be playing around with XUL development I should have a good tool, right? Besides, I'm tired of Visual Studio and Eclipse. Too much complexity, too much crud to set up when I just want to play around with some simple proof-of-concept stuff. So I grabbed a copy of the Komodo Editor and installed it on my Ubuntu box.
So far I've been very happy with the application. It loads quickly, and code completion and hints are instantaneous, giving the editor a snappy feel. The only shortfall is the lack of support for Subversion file repositories. But expecting a text editor to work with remote code control systems without needing a plugin is unfair, and if I really needed that functionality I could buy the full-blown IDE.
Posted by ashusta at January 29, 2007 09:03 PM