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Many developer, especially on linux, only ask for syntax highlight

They use linux command line tools as the development environment

Personally, i find working without intellisense or intelligent auto-completion very hard, but it seems many developers don't find this as important as i do

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Yeah I find intellisense/autocomplete really changes the way I design things. Without a tool like this, I spend a lot more time designing obvious, guessable, simple interfaces. With intellisense I'm not as concerned with that and I'll have much larger interfaces. I'm not saying one is better than the other (a lot of smaller, guessable interfaces might be more overhead than a few larger interfaces) but I do prefer my code w/o intellisense.

I did c++ in vim for a while, the movement in vim made it an excellent experience. I found the lack of intellisense made it annoying at first, but it force me to read the docs for the API or library I was using, which lead to much greater knowledge and probably a better implementation.

At work and play I use only vim to write C++, Python, Javascript, bash and web frontend stuff. Only plugin is rainbow parentheses. Manpages and web for docs. My system is very flexible and I wouldn't have it any other way.

So besides not having intellisense, you also don't have things such as go-to def/decl, show type info, switch between header/cpp files, etc... Not to mention debugger integration, right? Do you work on large scale projects with this setup?

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