Geert Bevin, known for his work on the full-stack open source framework ‘RIFE’, has an interesting post on artima developer about an interesting sounding IDE that I’ve never come across before called X-develop.
Geert mentions a couple of benefits of this IDE that I realize now seeing them in writing I find extremely infuriating with Eclipse – X-develop gives you ‘permissive’ code completition that still works even if you have compilation errors (which not many other IDEs including Eclipse do not), and the IDE itself takes up minimal screen real estate, something else that drives me crazy with the different perspectives and views in Eclipse.
Another cool feature which I would love to see in all IDEs (I’ve only read about this but have never seen it in an IDE before), is ‘back in time’ debugging, which allows you to step backwards through your code as well as forwards. This is an awesome feature. One of the most annoying features in current debuggers is that you are stepping through your code looking for that one particular place where you have some bug, and then you step too far by mistake and you miss it, and now you have to start again to get back to that one crucial place. If this feature is what it sounds like, then it would allow you to step back to previously executed code to see where you came from – that is an awesome timesaving feature.