Komodo 4.0 : I'm trying

5 Mar 2007

Komodo 4.0 : I'm trying

One of the nice side effects of speaking last month at the Vancouver PHP conference, was that one of the sponsors, ActiveState, gave out licenses for the latest version of Komodo - their IDE. Now, traditionally, I've had a really hard time using anything other than emacs for software development. I started using emacs in university 10 or so years ago, and it's just comfortable now. But, some drupal developers I know love it, so I'm giving it the ol' college try with Komodo. Here's how it's going:

The Good

Komodo is built on Mozilla technology. Why is that important? Well, it's a platform I believe in - that has to count for something, right? It also means that both projects can benefit each other, and Komodo is inherently cross-platform (something I still believe is important).
"Just works" debugging for PHP. Komodo works natively with xdebug for PHP debugging, and it works - and works well. As someone who writes a lot of "web services" type software, I see the value in being able to debug things when tools like var_dump() aren't readily accessible.
Some nice drupal-specific features as well as using drupal for their support site - that's got to win them something ;)
Emacs key-bindings

The less good

Performance. I don't know how Firefox does it, but it's the one XUL application on my G4 Powerbook that isn't dog slow (even Thunderbird struggles a bit). I probably just need a faster computer, really.
Emacs keybindings: there's just lots I can't seem to do from the keyboard. Mice and I have never gotten along, and my powerbook's trackpad is even worse. I try to avoid them as much as possible. For example, I like to periodically CVS/SVN update my working copy. Yes, there is a keybinding for this action, but as far as I can tell, I have to click on the project in the left hand side to make sure the update happens for the whole project (otherwise it only happens on the current file). Region selection is another example.
Komodo is not free. Again, this is personal belief (religion?), but as much as I appreciate Komodo for using Mozilla, I don't like the fact that the useful version of Komodo is not free. Had I not received a license for free, I'm not sure I could justify the cost.

All that said, I don't know that I've fully made up my mind yet. Because it's built on mozilla, Komodo is fully extensible - perhaps I could write extensions to make it just how I want it. Right now, however, I feel slow and clumsy in Komodo.

I'm going to keep trying - there is part of me that really wants to like it - but I'm not sold yet.

posted 12:28pm:

walkah's blog

tags:

pushback...

by Boris (not verified)

March 5, 2007 - 12:44pm

(I came here because I got your Twitter spam. Being honest. ;)

Firefox has never been anything less than hog for me. Even now with a most recent generation top of the line MacBookPro with 2 Gig of RAM, it takes for ever to start up and opening new windows (I have 2 extensions instlled... web developer and firebug). The people around me who aren't high on orange and blue smoke are also unimpressed.

Free? You think Firefox is free (as in freedom)? Google needs it's web-browser pawn to play chess versus MS, you know. ;)

Further along, not all software can be developped on the OSS model. How do you propose Komodo's developpers feed their kids?

Religions, beliefs and convictions are dangerous things. One should revise them on a regualr basis. :)

Firefox 3++

by ted (not verified)

March 5, 2007 - 4:04pm

Firefox 3 is significantly faster on my Mac. Just a note I've been alpha testing for a while and it's like night and day. And the whole font issue is fixed.

While that doesn't justify anything--it does speak to the fact that the issue is being addressed.

Running a MacBook Pro 1.83ghz here.

Yes~ I agree with you so

by college education (not verified)

February 25, 2008 - 4:10am

Yes~
I agree with you so much
Thank you for sharing this

Firefox and memory

by sepeck (not verified)

March 5, 2007 - 2:30pm

Just a mention because it deserves it, while Firefox is fast on Windows XP and Vista (yes, Vista) even their latest version of the 2 series has a memory leak so that you cannot leave Firefox open over night without it slowly becoming the biggest memory hog on the system.

pushing back on the pushback

by walkah

March 5, 2007 - 3:30pm

Welcome Boris - thanks for proving that twitter spam works ;)

Re: firefox performance - all I said is it wasn't *dog* slow. Thunderbird sometimes, and certainly komodo and songbird are downright unusable in terms of performance (window refreshing, random beachballing, etc). That said, when I disabled firebug, I saw an enormous speedup (which, when you think of what firebug actually does, per request, sorta makes sense). Safari is nice, but it's still fairly crippled, and i don't find it nearly as useful for web development - which is my primary interest in a browser. Bring on the Safari fanboys.

I can't argue with you on Google's vested interest in firefox development, however - employees and MoFo partnerships aside - they don't actually *own* any part of Firefox (or Mozilla). And yes, I define firefox as 'free' - in the pure free software sense. It's certainly the most free of the 'major' browsers (IE, opera and safari).

As for Komodo being free - I'm not going to insist to ActiveState that they need to make Komodo IDE free. I understand the rationale. How do they feed their kids? Well, they could probably answer best - but I'd guess it has more to do with the "Enterprise Support" tab on their site than Komodo licenses. That's pure speculation - but as someone who feeds his kids working on free software, I don't think it's a ludicrous idea.

Bottom line, however, is the 'religion' comment is intended sarcastically. This response comes from a powerbook - running OS X - which has a ton of non-free software running. Why? It works better than the free alternatives for the most part. When it comes to software, I'm pretty darn pragmatic.

*BUT*, as far as my personal decision goes - I've not seen anything yet to warrant the cost over the free emacs. But, never say never.

from the horse's mouth

by jeffg (not verified)

March 6, 2007 - 11:08am

Thanks for the feedback, I have some comments on the 'less good':

Performance: this has always been a problem on PPC / OSX. I don't think Komodo performance got decent on Macs until the core duo laptops showed up. As for Boris' comments about Firefox, i can only speculate what he is comparing the perofrmance to. I don't find mail.app or Safari that much faster on my MBP than FF or Komodo. And he *is* running tow of the heaviest and most invasive extensions available.

Emacs Keybindings: we introduced these in Komodo 3 to what amounted to deafening silence form the user community, and my impression is not much people use them, so any constructive feedback that would help us here would be great.

The svn -> refresh current project thing is a focus issue which could be solved with a Macro, but sounds more like a feature request to me.

By 'region selection' do you mean 'column selection' or something else? Column select mode on Macs is done with Ctrl+Shift+[arrow key]. There is also a command 'Select block' in Komodo that selects eg the current if block or function block, depending on cursor position. I have this mapped to Apple+B , and use it a lot.

As for the price, Komodo IDE is not free ( and we do feed our kids|cats|goldfish by selling Komodo Licenses ) however we do have Komodo Edit which is free and has all the great editing features of Komodo IDE ( just not the debugger, and other tools ).

Thanks Jeff!

by walkah

March 6, 2007 - 1:41pm

Nice to get some feedback from the horse's mouth :)

I hear you on performance, and realize that you're largely constrained from the mozilla end here. Bottom line is, I just need a new laptop ;)

I'm not surprised to hear that the emacs keybindings were met with resounding silence. I wandered into Andrei's vim talk @ vanphp and realized I was likely the lone emacs user at the conference :) The fact that the keybindings are customizable is helpful.

As for SVN - one thing that I really love in emacs is the PCL-CVS and PSVN overview buffers - where you can easily see all changed files in your working copy, and do updates, commits, etc. Perhaps my real feature request here would be to actually have a VC tab with such an overview....

Re: regions - looks like there is a way to set marks ... but no region-based controls - a la emacs' "kill-region" : http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/LCSR-Computing/some-docs/emacs-chart.html

I don't expect you to give away Komodo IDE ... just keep giving me free licenses ;)

I like Firefox.

by Bradley (not verified)

May 29, 2007 - 3:59am

I'm not sure if I like firefox because I've used it for so long or because of the untold number of addon apps you can add it.

I've never used anything else as a browser other than IE.

If Komodo isn't free does that mean that any addons won't be free either?

Brad
Beneful Dog Food

Reply

by Anonymous (not verified)

October 20, 2007 - 12:21pm

I am a firefox convert

by property abroad (not verified)

March 21, 2008 - 12:09pm

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komodo performance

by Anonymous (not verified)

April 15, 2008 - 9:33am

I can't really confirm your point on komodo being slow - actually, i found it rather fast, when i used it the first time. Even though my system is fairly old and slow (2.8ghz athlon xp processor, a gig of ram and normal PATA harddrives, running on archlinux)
But that might be because i was used using eclipse before i switched to komodo, and eclipse is sometimes literally slow as a snail.