You don’t even need a text editor, you can write it on paper.
But both are terrible options if you want to actually get stuff done, now that we have better tools.
How are you going to build that application you wrote on the paper?
Mate people feel hacky if they use VIM to write code. Double the time, and corrections commits all the time
Oh yeah, vim motions are peak. Still not a substitute for a decent IDE, though.
Vim is great at what it does (help you write/change text faster), I just don’t think that’s the right goal to pursue when it comes to software development.
Still not a substitute for a decent IDE, though.
It is with plugins, however. I’ve used neovim for years at work and it has LSP capabilities and grammar-based syntax parsing. So it provides lots of IDE-like features on top of its excellent text-editing features. Nevwrmind that it integrates with the terminal much better than IDEs.
So I couldn’t disagree more with your statement
Had some juniors who was git diffing in the terminal PRs of 20 more files with 200 changed lines. A newly appointed senior told them that was the best approach. Needless to say there had always to be some follow up push after they opened the PR on web. U dont need ai, but you need a fucking GUI.
Or TUI.
need ai integration to code
Nah that dude is on the left, and he makes 250k per year
You also need a compiler or interpreter because wtf man you gotta run some stuff during development
If you write C code in a text file and rename the file extension to .exe and try to run it the CPU will do something.
This statement is technically correct, the best kind of correct.
compiler or interpreter
I mean yeah I need a web browser, but I’m not coding in it.
What, you dont program in binary? What a noob.
No I program with a magnetised needle and a steady hand.
I do, I just use abstractions and metaprogramming layers to do so more efficiently. Sounds like your workflow could use improving
Why do you need a text editor? Just use radiation to bit flip the memory into the configuration you need.
Just need a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
I have never seen or known a serious professional who preferred to work outside of a full featured IDE. All the most skilled and highest paid developers I’ve ever known were more adamant about using the IDE when compared to the less skilled developers who preferred to do things more via command line and text editors. Just my experience. I often suspect that this meme is shared and liked by people who aren’t really professionals. Perhaps I just haven’t encountered them yet.
Just for reference, because programming is not one big tent, as far as I know most people working professionally developing for the Linux kernel, gcc and glic uses only a text editor and “Unix as your IDE”. I never tried myself but I have a feeling that any IDE with git integration would just immediately cry trying to interact with the kernel or gcc git repo. Even gits own PS1 status feature slows to crawl in this repos.
The largest repos in the world are monorepos (the major tech companies). IDEs can handle those codebases just fine (might be modified).
I’m a “serious professional” who has been developing for over 20 years and I’ve generally prefer a text editor the IDEs that I’ve had to use at work. I find that most IDEs are slow resource hogs that don’t give me features that I actually care about over a fast text editor.
The singular exception was Cider when I was at Google. It was fantastic at wrangling their massive monorepo, and integration with their code review and ticket system was nice. Somehow it was snappy and reliable even though it ran in Chrome.
Nowadays I’ve switched to Helix and use LSPs for the languages I use most. For what it’s worth, those are C, C++, Rust and Python. Mostly Rust and Python now.
That’s the first time I’ve heard a positive review of Cider. Compared to IntelliJ it was really lacking.
I know more than one person (I think 4, including me) who code for a living and essentially live in tmux.
So, you’ve never known any Unix hackers? I worked for a student datacenter when I was at university, and we were mostly vim users; as far as text-editor diversity, we did have one guy who was into emacs and another who preferred nano. After that, I went to work at Google, where I continued to use vim. As far as fancy IDE features, I do use syntax highlighting and I know how to use the spell checker but I don’t use autocomplete. I’ve heard of neovim but don’t have a good reason to try it out yet; maybe next decade?
I’m one of those nano weirdos. I mean, I get why people use vi/vim, but I’m a lazy man who has the nano shortcuts hardwired into my muscle memory. It’s definitely not as full-featured as vim, but it does what I need it to do quickly and easily. If I need to just quickly drop into a file and do a find/replace, takes me maybe 3 seconds.
Also, to share an ancient joke from the dawn of computing: emacs is a great OS, I just hope someone makes a decent text editor for it eventually.
On the contrary most people I know who “really know their shit” are using neovim and cli tools.
I, on the other hand, would not consider someone a serious, competent professional if they were unable to do their job without an IDE. Sure, every serious developer I’ve known uses an IDE or similar for day to day work, but that’s a matter of convenience. In my book “competence” includes being able to do your job without needing your hand held by the IDE.
Many embedded developers would like to have a word with you
It’s all variable, and highly dependent on the languages you use, the types of applications you develop, your personal workflows, what you learned with and got used to as you were learning to program, and a myriad of other factors. Painting in broad strokes, like what the meme is doing or what you’re doing, is almost never correct. There’s always nuance.
The best I know uses mcedit, there definitely life beyond IDEs
The Minecraft world editor? They use that for developing non-Minecraft world software? That’s pretty fascinating. What sort of things do they develop with it?
Nah, Midnight Commander’s. And literally everything, websites, shell script, data pipelines, satellites…
If you’re in a jvm or Microsoft heavy environment then maybe so.
I learned to copy/paste website source code into notepad when I was a teenager, so vscodium is more than enough for my needs. I have been full time doing front end web dev, shipping in production, since 2014. I do svelte these days for internal tooling for a well known grocer currently. Having Linux experience as well ever since knoppix came out also helped
I would call vscode(ium) an IDE
It is not
When I think IDE I think Visual Studio or IntelliJ or XCode, these extremely heavy single use (originally at least, C# Java and ObjC respectively) behemoths. But then again I was born in the late 1900s. I think of vscode and atom before more akin to a JavaScript successor of notepad++
If it does more than allow you to edit text, then it’s an IDE. Semantic find and replace? IDE. “Go to definition”? IDE. Terminal in the same window? IDE. Git integration? IDE.
I use vscode (or codium when not at work) these days because it’s a one stop shop for every language and every feature I could ever need is possible with a plugin. I have used visual studio, intelliJ and others in the past, and i fail to see the distinction from a usage perspective
Not saying you’re wrong, I’m just explaining what I think of when I think ide. I think of visual studio and its integration into windows dev, Xcode and its integration for macOS and apple dev, etc. I think of vscode as a super sublime text in its goals, or akin to vim/helix
I have never seen or known a serious professional
I think your message ended there, you accidentally copypasted some garbage after that statement.
Hey, I was explicitly being open to being wrong and acknowledging that I may simply not have encountered those kinds of professionals. I don’t even think I was being hostile, only saying that from my perspective the idea of this meme is a misunderstanding propagated by people with less experience.
But rather than present any evidence, even anecdotal, taking it personally (even as a joke) serves only to publicly make me look more correct 🤷
I don’t think you were hostile, you just have a different experience than others in this thread. At my workplace we design hardware and make embedded systems. Depending on which part of the system you’re working on you’ll either never leave Visual Studio or exclusively use the unix command line. Both groups are absolutely serious professionals. Not every workplace is like mine; most will have only one of the two groups.
The only people who would take you being “more correct” from any of this are those who don’t know much about SW development. In internet lingo, what you wrote in your OC is called ragebait.
Maybe you’re just very easily enraged?
You can take away my auto complete, performance monitoring and all that jazz but you can’t tell me a debugging system isn’t absolutely essential if you actually want to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time
Why debugger when print?
Because I don’t hate myself
Embedded systems 😁
That’s what a single red LED is for, right?
Is the single red LED solid, or is it flashing Morse for “please kill me”?
javascript moment
Most text editors like vim/emacs/ect have ways of using a debugger.
I remember vim being a bit involved, but the performance was awesome.
But then if you put enough bells and whistles on text editors, do they become an ide?
But then if you put enough bells and whistles on text editors, do they become an ide?
Yes
9000 IQ programmer starts every project rolling their own debugger instead of dedicating 8GB of RAM to vscode
gdb works great without an IDE, and many text editors have autocomplete.
It depends on what you do, but generally I can’t argue against a debugger.
I think you are not looking at the full picture - there are developments (arguably everything back-end) where a debugging system is absolutely not essential and in many cases (multithreading) outright useless for some types of bugs.
Feel free to not use a debugger for your software. But I don’t hate myself so I’m going to stick to using one whenever possible.
Saying it is not essential and saying it is generally useless are two very different things.
I believe that is a vast minority of developments. And tbh multithreading debugging is a breeze in C# on Rider (except race conditions, those will always be tricky, but also easily identifiable).
And I believe you are very wrong in that belief. However, a reliable statistic is not the first search result that I can find, so we’ll have to disregard the disagreement on that point. You lost me at your C# multithreading reasoning though. A debugger will always interfere with the processes you are looking at, hence making debugging of multithreading-related errors a game of whack-a-mole.
A debugger will always interfere with the processes you are looking at, hence making debugging of multithreading-related errors a game of whack-a-mole.
It’s a very pleasant debugging experience when you can easily switch threads, have them log what happened first, check the variables in the thread at the moment in time it was hit (vs now), etc. etc.
Most concurrency problems disappear at the pace of a debugger.
I disagree that a person with low IQ would think its possible to code using a simple text editor. If anything he needs IDE more than any one else.
Yeah, it doesn’t fit the template but the low IQ version would be more like “You only need ChatGPT for coding.”
Nah, you gotta copy/paste the code somewhere!
Every self-taught programmer I’ve seen starts off hacking at something in Notepad.
I started with mIRC script editor, which was only a tiny step above notepad.
Depends on where you start. When your first contact is HTML its not too unusual to use a text editor for development.
esp. if you started at the time when all you had for designing page layout were frames…
I interpreted it more like saying the first place people learn to code, especially if you’re not self taught, is in a text editor like vim or emacs.
Joke’s on you, with LSPs most text editors are full IDEs.
Text editor? IDE?
ALL I need is my keypunch machine.
nuff saidMy emacs is sitting at 360 MB but I consider it an IDE
WHY is emacs at 360mb is the real question
Kate, my beloved
Kate has a built-in terminal option (just like Dolphin file manager) and that can be super handy when using gcc.
i’m not claiming this is truly representative in any way, RAM consumption is very variable, but the tendency is still clear lol
Well IntelliJ is written in Java tbh, you could reasonably have an IDE with less consumption
It’s also very nice to use. Though I really should move to Zed or something
2Gb well spent
give me a text editor with svc integration, project scoping, and syntax highlighting and I’ll use it forever.
I have no desire to work on a large project in a plain text editor.
That is the beauty of it: no one forces you to do so.
Mmh nobody forces me to, but someone did just imply I have bad hair for doing so 🤔
Okay I will concede your point. :) You do have bad hair g
😭
Minus the “AI” part and I somewhat agree with the middle person, at least for HTML/CSS. I love how Bluefish has auto tag completion so I can focus on what goes inside instead of having to close open tags.
Tbf a text editor will also do that for you these days
Fair enough.
Join the Vim cult! We have blackjack! And hookers!
(No guarantee of blackjack or hookers upon initiation).
Already joined the emacs cult. Youre too late.
Don’t worry, cult membership is flexible.
Do you use evil or normal? I’ve tried to switch away from my IDE but honestly the amount of time it takes to learn something new has just led me to not bother
I use the normal mode
I hate vim because of my first vim experience.
Can be traumatizing for some…
Their jser retention strategy is… interesting.
I felt the same. Then I made sure to learn how to exit, then save, then find and replace, then save as a different file. Now I love it.
