I never honestly thought I would see the day I was glad to get rid of Anjuta. I really liked it for a long time. It was good to me till things began to change on my computer. I switched from KDE to Gnome and finally to Fluxbox. I’ve upgraded compilers and learned(ing) to write in new languages. Not to mention to that for some reason as my computer changed around Anjuta it ceased to function properly. It would no longer compile programs for me, much less compile and execute them! So no I got rid of Anjuta. It was no longer serving its purpose. Let us not forget that Anjuta is a full IDE. At my current skill level I probably know how to use all of 2% of the features Anjuta offers. Here we run into a problem though. I meet a lot of experienced programmers on the Internet. I know, I’ve seen their code (we are talking open source here). Very few of these programmers use IDEs. Makes me wonder. Now I’m only talking open source programmers here. I have many proprietary programmers as well, most of which use IDE; mainly Visual Studio for Microsoft. So even though I can’t explain the difference I have noticed it. I digress. The point is almost every programmer I meet whose worth his salt uses a text editor to write code, not an IDE. So back to Anjuta, I realized all I was doing was using it as a text editor. That made Anjuta bloated, slow, and almost worthless to me. So I got rid of it. Foolishly, I got rid of it before I found a suitable replacement, but it is gone!
Screenshot of Anjuta from http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/

On to the screenshot. I have by the way decided to try to include a screenshot in most of posts. I think pictures are worth a thousand words, not to mention I think they look nice and make the blog more interesting to read. Continuing on though. I’ve decided to switch to Gvim after browsing around /usr/portage and Google looking for a suitable replacement. I don’t really like plain old vi, and vim isn’t much better (for newbes) in my opinion. As I’m sure most people do, I really hate the default look of vim. Its black, its plain, its not appealing to me in the least bit. So after some more searching I found Gvim. All it is, is a GUI interface attached to vim, which is great because it makes life easy for me while I learn the commands for vim. Not to mention its not bad looking either. I will be honest though, its not all mine. On the Gentoo forums I regularly encounter a user by the name of ciaranm. I wouldn’t call us friends, after all, its not like we talk to each other on a regular basis (or at all), but I read his blog a lot. It has a lot of very informative information in it. On his blog he posted his vimrc file. I copied and pasted it into mine. Deleted all the parts I didn’t want or didn’t know what they were for (to prevent weird occurrences) and ran with it. So far its serving me well. A lot of the stuff I borrowed from him was general in nature. Default indent size, etc. Still none the less it was originally his.
So there you have it. An extremely long winded tale of how I switched from Anjuta to Gvim. Another major up for me was by removing Anjuta and installing Gvim I must of saved upwards of 50M of space. Now I only wish I new what dependencies Anjuta had that I no longer need. Either way though. Enjoy the Penguins!


