Feeling the Love

I think I've been spoiled these last so many years. It's gotten to the point where I cannot program without it.  I've tried to do it, on my own, for different projects, on the weekend, late at night, but I find that its just not the same.  I actually need it now.  I hunger for it when I don't have it.  It's as if my brain turns off and won't let me proceed unless it is there.  I just can't live without my Intellisense. 

Try, if you dare.  Use Notepad or even your favorite code editor.  You don't get the pop ups do you?  You don't get reminded after each dot what would logically come next.  You don't get the instant reminder of the contents of your code base and the volumes of APIs awaiting out there in the void.  You don't get the handy squiggles underlining your errors, long before you even bother to compile.  You don't get the instant rewrite, correcting your errors as you type.  You don't feel the love of an editor that really, truly wants to be your friend.

I need it so much that I'm willing to do almost anything to keep it.  Since I work on the compiler, in the same immense codebase as the rest of the product, I experiences all the growing pains as the editor and its ilk are torn down and refitted.  I experience the bugs as they come, working around those I can, being stalled by those that I cannot.  I work in the face of a appallingly slow debug build and the pestering assert dialogs that lurk behind the innocent facade.  Yet, still I persist.  Why?  Because its my editor.  Its got the intellisense.  I need it to even breathe.

Matt