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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

If you cannot convince your boss, I suggest changing your workflow. Don't use IntelliJ. I love it and pay for the commercial version, but I use Emacs and Vi for lots of things, including Java code. You can use a more light weight editor like VS Code etc. If you are on Windows, Notepad++ etc are also good options. You don't need IntelliJ to learn Java. Indeed it will hinder your students learning of the fundamentals.

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You’re insane to recommend emacs and vim to beginners. You’re right that you dont need IntelliJ, but vi and emacs for complete beginners seems a bit stretched.

The better recommendation would be VsCode or Sublime using the eclipse language server.

I'm not sure about emacs, but I don't think there is anything wrong with teaching vim to new programmers. I learned it along with Java in my first programming course. I think it should be presented as an option along with other editors, though.

Thanks for your suggestion. I think not using an IDE isn't the best idea, since then they've never used it when they start their first job. They're complete beginners. While I agree it's important to understand the fundamentals (and I do in fact teach them how to compile just with javac), I also think it's important to be familiar with modern tooling.

Using vim or emacs instead of an IDE is more 'hardcore' than it is second-class to IDEs.

I could see it be a disadvantage to use vim/emacs for the use case of debugging.. but, the last thread I saw on debugging on HN had about half the replies say they just do printf debugging because they can't figure out how to setup debugging.

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