After spending so much time customizing my vim and GVIM programming environment, I finally decided to give in and use the Eclipse IDE for managing my programming projects. The overwhelmingly large scale of the Aerva project I'm working on made me realize that I need a better way of keeping track of all the files, classes, functions, and templates. I also purchased a MyEclipse subscription ($30 a year). MyEclipse is a plugin for Eclipse that features a visual HTML editor (WYSIWYG), similar to Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
Previously, I had been using VMWare on my laptop to run Windows XP on top of Linux (Ubuntu). I then used Dreamweaver to create HTML pages and copied the HTML over to whatever PHP script I was working on in GVIM. It was a messy; constantly switching from one window to another. Now I have a WYSIWYG HTML editor (through MyEclipse), PHP syntax highlighting and other PHP tools (through PHPEclipse) all integrated in a single programming environment (Eclipse).
If I have one thing to say about Eclipse, it's that they need to make the installation process easier. When you visit the Eclipse homepage, it's difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. Everything is a link to something else that only describes vague features. But I guess that's what you can expect to happen when you create a platform that's designed solely for developers who want to create plugins that add functionality to the platform. Eclipse is like the skeleton for a creature and using plugins you create the animal you want.
What your saying would be French to me, except I can understand French. =-D
Now that I look back at what I wrote, I suppose it does look like what a non-French speaking person would see French as; but that was the purpose of the post (and the reason I separated it from The Swarm post).