Tools
One of the perennial points of discussion about coding is about which tools to use. I have been an inveterate user of one or another vi clone for almost twenty years, from elvis on RISC OS to vim on Ubuntu. Vim does fulfil many of the roles of an IDE, especially when running on *nix, where you get so many IDE features for free (ctags, make etc).
However, I have finally been seduced by an IDE, Wing. The Zope debugging was the killer feature for me, but the rest of it is excellent. And it even has vi keybindings!
For UML, I use the excellent MagicDraw. A few years ago I tried UML editors exhaustively and I’m certain this is the best of the lot. In particular it supports Robustness Diagrams, something missing from a lot of editors.
This week I was introduced to OxygenXML, and I’m very impressed. One project I am working on uses XSLT and XPath heavily, and Oxygen’s XSLT debugging is truly awesome. I’m using it now for editing KID templates too, and it works really well.
Of course, these are a tad more resource intensive than good old vim. Running MagicDraw, Wing and OxygenXML together would need a shade under 4GB to avoid swapping entirely. None of my machines can take more than 2GB, so there is a little bit of swapping sometimes ;)