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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

IDE's format and display text. Outside of compiling, they should respond instantly on a blight-ridden potato, with resources to spare.

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Text editors just format and display text. IDEs have compilers, debuggers, indexers, source control integration, analysis tooling, WSL integration, SSH integration, and whatever plugins you might have installed.

Why would a compiler take up resources when you’re not compiling anything?

To show compilation errors as you type.

Why not show the UI immediately and start the language server asynchronously in the background, like Neovim does it?

JetBrains IDEs do this.

That is possible, but if swapping happens due to memory pressure it can still cause slowdowns in unrelated parts of the same or other processes.

Does that definition of “text editor” still describe anything commonly used? Language servers cover a lot of that. SSH and source control are ubiquitous. I can’t think of anything in years I’ve heard of people using that would count as just a text editor.

Most popular text editors blurs the line these days. Vim can be the most straightforward text editor out there, or the most comprehensive IDE depending on how much you go into its environment. I keep Vs code bare bones and mostly use it as a text editor, but it only needs a dozen extensions to be a full fledged IDE.

It's not surprising to hear few true text editors because a text editor is more or less a solved problem. Notepad++ is 20 years old and still functions fine for those who want a pure text editor. Anyone making a modern text editor is either doing it to learn or to build up into an IDE later.

  IDE's format and display text

This is only a small part of what IDEs are doing. Also, even just formatting and displaying text is hella difficult. How many years was Zed in development until 1.0?

This is obviously massively understating what an IDE does.

Do you never use language server features? Showing git blame on files? Doing regex search and replace? Doing multi-cursor editing? Run test?

If you genuinely never do, then that's ok, you don't need an IDE.

I do this all the time in Emacs, which runs on an old computer and handles it quickly. None of the tasks on this list require significant CPU resources.

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