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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE.

VSCode it is based on is text editor.

AI features are great but it is not IDE.

This. I hate VSCode as an IDE and is the reason why I have not used Cursor. I wish Jetbrains actually had some brains to build a better coding agent inside their IDEs (which I think are one of the best out there), but for now Im stuck with codex/cc + Jetbrains IDE

What do you define as an IDE then? I think something with an integrated terminal, file system and git UI is the essential set for most development.

IDE ships it's own compiler, debugger, usually some sort of container/container orchestrator and database tool. I.e. the things that separate hobby projects from production ones. VSCode has these things but they're extensions, not build into the editor

So long as I can do those things within the editor, it is an IDE in every respect other than pedantry.

You're right, the meaning has become pedantic so I'd put forward a new term because the line between editor and IDE is blurred... but there's still a vast difference between editing on vscode vs IDEA or Goland.

ILE? Integrated Language Environment. The former caters to a specific language ecosystem. Text editors are polyglots by contrast.

It is not pedantic.

If you call text editor that has terminal bolted on that’s not IDE. It is exactly the same as if you would open terminal on the side. Grepping/search with regex is also far from code navigation that is available in an IDE.

Debugging tools and code navigation in a proper IDE like Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider is totally different development experience than editor with terminal.

I am not trying to be pedantic, I am really just curious because I’ve never heard someone saying something like vscode isn’t an IDE. I am mostly curious because those of us that write languages like Ruby or python with no compiler that typically debug in the terminal or repl feel like we have an IDE and refer to it as such.

I also think your characterization about hobby/production fall short. My fastAPI and rails codebases anre definitely not a hobby.

Thanks for clarifying though. Interesting to hear your perspective.

> I also think your characterization about hobby/production fall short. My fastAPI and rails codebases anre definitely not a hobby.

That's not what I said?

What I said the was the line between hobby/production is use of the tools themselves. Doesn't matter if you use them via a terminal, VSCode extension, or an external app.

Line between editor/IDE is the former requires downloading extensions but the latter bundles them in the final application.

I guess you never got to debug multithreaded applications in Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider.

Debugging and code navigation are much better in proper IDE. In text editors you grep/search with regex.

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