BloggEd

Unless you don’t develop software with Eclipse or you live in the woods, you have probably heard of Mylar. It is an astonishing piece of software implemented as an Eclipse plugin, helping you a lot when working with large software projects. And it is not even restricted to Java; in principle it should coexist happily with pydev and radrails, if you develop stuff with those. What does it do, then? Well, it automatically creates a context view based on augmented task list supplied by Mylar itself, watching what files, classes and methods you work with and filters views based on your work (always allowing you to quickly get to the plain, ol’ package explorer if needed). As Mylar folks say, it gives you a nice, aluminum shades thus protecting your eyes from information blindness. Not only that, Mylar seamlessly integrates and synchronizes your tasks with different issue tracking systems – well, at least bugzilla, trac and few others are supported at the moment.

Have you ever been into a situation where you create some TODO list and write a task description for fidgety widget, accomplish the task, commit those changes to some VC system writing implemented fidgety widget as a comment (you do comment your commits, don’t you?), moving on and hacking elsewhere. After a while you get a bug report, fix the problem (by first creating an automated test which captures the bug, now don’t tell me you didn’t), then enter svn commit -m "fixed issue #42" or equivalent after entering a more verbose explanation to your issue tracking system, of course.

Sound familiar? How convenient.

Now, Mylar does all that and more so neatly without having to enter roughly the same information several times that you start to wonder how people ever even bothered to do these things the old way. And it doesn’t get into your way like some other AI-inclined tools often do.

But you, don’t take my hype for it, please go check the video Getting Started

And hey, if you are like me and have used (X)Emacs or VI(m) for 10 years now and you’d like to try Eclipse but you don’t dare because you’ve used so much time to finally master every dusty corner of your favorite editor which is actually hooked to your coffee brewing machine and you even extended Eliza so that it actually wrote your master’s thesis for you, even that shouldn’t stop you trying Eclipse & Mylar.