News Microsoft to launch Visual Studio IDE for Apple's macOS

Gareth, you've seen me write it before...

Microsoft...? Office for Linux?

I mean, if you can port Visual Studio to Mac...!

 

Yep. Agreed.

...and yet, hope springs eternal.

 

Dumb question: Visual Studio for Linux? I know there's GCC and the like, but the VS IDE is just so luvverly...

 

I'd get it on the company 365, sure I'm not alone!

 

Excel does things that Calc does not (and the devs say never will). Reference managers can also be a little flaky with LibreOffice, which is a colossal PITA. My favoured one works, but sometimes goes a bit nuts for reasons I can't figure out. Never have the same problem in Word.

 

I wrote my thesis in Libre Office and it genuinely broke me. It is just awful. I had a large amount of diagrams charts and images and the formatting had a mind of its own. I would close the document then reopen and stuff would move around and some images even disappeared entirely. I eventually had to put images in hidden tables as a work around for the formatting issues the disappearing images was never solved. I had to keep the document open until I finished editing and exported the pdf. You can't have different styles on the same paragraph and so adding a heading on the same line as the content starts (as is required by some academic formats) is not possible without a slow manual work around. I also had a page numbering bug when messing with the TOC. The header and footer spacing controls are weird. I could go on and on.

The worst thing is, it has the most insidious feature a piece of software can have. A veil of adequacy. When you start using it you believe it's good enough for the job only to find that it really isn't once you start stressing it. But the realisation only comes after a point where you have committed so much time to it that switching platforms isn't an option and so you just have to power through with it.

I've since learned a bit about LaTex and if I were stuck on Linux again I would probably set up a template with it and use that.

 

I agree completely. Except I actually need to put some time into learning LaTeX, but learning FORTRAN is currently higher on my list so I can fix some old code. :blush

 

FORTRAN? Ah yes, the malt liquor:

It's not too bad if you have a pre-written template. Starting from scratch would be difficult though. I like the programmery vibe to it, it's generally more predictable than a WYSIWYG editor and if it's not working it's something you can fix by tweaking and googling. Plus it means I can use Vim as a text editor which is also quite nice once you get your head around it.

 

I chose it over Emacs because vi comes installed with most linux distros. So it made sense to learn. I don't have the patience to learn another one.

 

Really ought to learn Vim some time.
Rarely hit a CLI text editor except to make commits, and nano's just fine for that.

 

I use Vi as much as I can, but I still screw up occasionally. Sigh. Usually when I'm trying to do something really simple, and muscle memory gets ahead of me.

I actually quite like FORTRAN, and it's a ton quicker than C for what the program is doing.

It's fairly easy; just remember 'escape' is your friend, and colon-w-q.