Thjis is just what Vim and emacs die-hards won't recognize. This is the value of an IDE. The driving force behind these editors' popularity is bad developers.
For many, though, once you get your environment set up, it feels amazingly natural, more than an IDE could provide. It's more a matter of taste than anything.
* Autocomplete. This deserves way more recognition than it gets. Having function signatures, documentation, overloads, types, available IN-LINE while you type saves so much work from programming and is essential to delivering correct code. If you want to be an effective programmer, this is a fundamental tool.
* Debugger. Easy breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, built-in profiling... Without these features, you will consistently produce inferior code.
I don't see how someone who calls themselves a serious programmer can throw away these exceptional tools.
VIM and other lightweights have their place, their place just isnt serious programming (by which I mean large software projects).
Whats more, VIM and similar tools make each step of the process, including incredibly simplke things like compiling and running your program, take exponentially longer and are similarly more xpensive to the programmer. I think most folks who don't believe this are simply in denial. VSCode delivers on these two features and is instantly an infinitely superior programming experience.
Its a cult.
An idiot savant is still an idiot.
I'll welcome any points made for VIM that acknowledge the immense value provided by IDEs, but if I had already seen such points I wouldn't even be posting here today.
Every argument I've seen for VIM systematically denies:
* That programming is hard work.
* That making life easier is a good thing.
Its just an extension of the masochism that permeates programming culture.
Where vim and command line tools shine is giving the developer powerful tools to examine and manipulate projects, as they exist, on disk.
I personally believe there's a place for both. Vim and the cli are my secret weapon when it comes to comprehending, researching, and working with large, legacy, java enterprise applications. I only use an IDE when I'm actually editing java source files, which isn't very often. YMMV.
The individuals you are disparaging are merely talented developers working on useful projects they possess neither a surprising intellectual talent nor profound disability.
Despite your very superior opinion of yourself disagreeing with you doesn't imply mental disability.
In general, the stronger your opinions the more you must work to ensure that they're communicated in as non-alienating a way as possible. This is one of the fundamental forces of communication/persuasion. As it stands, your current comment leans on hyperbole quite a bit, and uses unkind labels for groups of people who are quite likely to read your comment. As a result, I suspect your comment may not go over well.
Linus uses microEMACS, Guido uses emacs, Bjarne uses sam. The list goes on. What is your point exactly? That they are all fools & idiots? Or that the Linux, python & C++ projects do not qualify as serious programming?
Is it unfathomable that they know something you don't? Is it inconceivable that some people out there have a different yet valid opinion?
My personal experience with the few large codebases I've had to work on in the past is that IDEs would choke on them. If we wanted to get any work done that day we'd have to do it in a lighter code editor. As an added bonus, if we used vim or emacs we could now be as proficient remotely as we were locally.
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_24.html#24.3
And a debugger doesn't have to be built into an editor to be functional. PDB, GDB, PRY, your browser's built-in debugger... all are quite useful without being built-in to your code editor. As a bonus, all but the last can be easily accessed from your terminal (which, hey, you have multiple terminal windows readily available in tmux!).
Sorry, troll fed. My apologies.
Coding. This deserves way more recognition than it gets. Having function signatures, documentation, overloads, types available IN-YOUR HEAD while you type saves so much work from programming and is essential to delivering correct code. If you want to be an effective programmer, you need to stop relying only on autocompletion.
And as always.. have a nice day!
I've only spent a few hours in GDB so far (mainly because my working environment doesn't let me), but once you've tried it, it's astonishing how little comfort most IDEs actually give you when compared to it.
I had to remotely debug C/C++ code on a very obscure ARM platform. Normal IDEs didn't get me anywhere. There are GDB wrappers like Nemiver that worked, but still were very clunky.
But with GDB in TUI mode, I just had to SSH in. If I have to learn two or three commands to use it, so be it.
Every time I have to do any of that remote debugging dance with any Microsoft product, I still long back for my GDB terminal. :-/