[mslate]

In my experience an IDE becomes a crutch for beginners to programming (and I reserve my right to change my opinion).

IDEs helps new engineers by postponing having to learn high productivity command line tools like Bash and Git.

I see this all the time with new engineers (read: bootcamp graduates) and it is expensive having to educate new employees about the context in which their IDE operates (whether that's locally, test, staging or production).

The IDE's value-add also becomes more questionable when developing on more than one part of the stack (e.g. client + server-side code).

There are also costs to vendor lock-in--no one should have to use your IDE to be able to contribute to your software. The IDE licensing business is a racket as evidenced by the JetBrains incident:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089

I think it's a good exercise to remind yourself: "what do I need beyond syntax-highlighting?" IMO, most IDE features are low value-add and do not increase productivity.

[bobbytherobot]

This is weird, because half of the engineers I know with more than 10 years use an IDE with the most popular being IntelliJ.

Bootcamp people seem to mostly use Atom - which isn't really an IDE in my mind. In my opinion, a core feature of an IDE is static analysis.

[collyw]

Easy to use step through debugger is the main reason I use an IDE (Eclipse based because its what I know, and doesn't as far as i am aware lead to lock in). Also I have SQLExplorer plugin for the database. I have been tempted to learn Vim or Emacs but I can't really find a good reason to spend the time learning a load of obscure keyboard commands for everything when my IDE appears to do all of those things.

I would welcome opinions on what I am missing out on going the IDE route.