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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

You can't achieve what a modern IDE can do using a simple editor and the command line.

Autocomplete, hinting, type checking, navigation, documentation display, automated refactoring, interactive debugging, and integration with other tools like test runners and databases, are some of the major features which yes, are indeed force multipliers.

This all becomes even more important when working on large codebases, and/or code you didn't write all yourself.

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My vim configuration, environment, and screen splitting using tmux giving me CLI tools in other windows together gives me every single feature you listed and more. My shell and environment being Turing complete not counting vimscript I imagine it would be hard to find anything a IDE could do that I can not.

For reference: https://gitlab.com/datenstrom/home

Edit: just saw your response to the sibling reply didn't realize you included (enhanced) Vim in IDEs as I haven't heard of it referred to as one before, quite the opposite usually.

It's not so much that I include Vim as an IDE, as that it's not a "basic editor" like gedit.

Although I will say that I've been using Vim a lot less since I started using VScode.

That looks like an awesome Vim environment though!

You can do all of those things in all four of the editors discussed.

The comment I replied to was asking about comparing those kinds of editor to "basic editors (e.g., gedit) and reaching for grep/sed/etc when I need something fancy." You certainly can't reasonably do most of those things with that toolset.

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