[Bankq]

I can relate to this. The problem is I already know how to get my work done (efficiently) in Emacs and find any change of my everyday tools to be daunting. Any advices on how to experience "what modern IDEs are capable of out of the box" without major pain?

[sonofaplum]

I've found one of the best ways to experiment with other text editors is to use them for one specific type of task or type of file. So when I started using vim I only used it edit config files. Makes it easier to lock into the mental mode of using a particular editor.

[hqian]

This is a very good piece of advice! I do have to configure my emacs every time I take on a new type of task albeit not very often. I'll give it try next time. Thanks!

[w0rd-driven]

I don't think I've seen a modern IDE that doesn't either have vi/emacs keybindings included or has a rich enough ecosystem for someone else to do so. I'm someone that cut my teeth in Linux, on many distros that never had pico/nano installed but to this day I still have to lookup basic references just to get anything changed on those systems. If I have the access, I immediately install nano because I can handle those keybindings a little easier.

I feel like Atom or Visual Studio Code are good pseudo IDEs but a lot of people hate the Electron tax. I spend most of my day in PHPStorm (ugh php) but I have both Atom and VSC installed primarily to understand the life in between a seemingly more 'dedicated' IDE like PHPStorm over this in between both editors seem to fill. They're primarily editors with IDE layers on top and for the price of $0 it's a good place to cut your teeth if you can stomach the tax. The JetBrains IDEs do have generous evaluation periods but I don't think you would be in an extremely comfortable place at the end. It took me a little more than 30 days to become as intimately familiar as I am now but like the bigger Visual Studio at my last gig, there's parts of PHPStorm I just don't touch and maybe never will.

This is probably not the best answer but there really isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of transition either. I think the most rudimentary concept that sold me on a proper IDE over an editor was syntax checking. Editors like emacs or vi may have better support for that than Coda or Notepad++ but knowing the script won't compile immediately vs deploying broken code and finding it there has more than paid for the difference. The most powerful feature of PHPStorm for me is setting breakpoints and having the Xdebug integration give me a peek at everything visually. There are still cases where I debug with echo/var_dump statements but if I can attach the debugger, I can do so much more. The likely biggest draw for a JetBrains product is the refactoring capabilities. Again, some editors likely do refactorings really well but when my refactoring in Notepad++ involved just find/replace it really isn't comparable in the slightest.

I think at the end of the day productivity gains through workflow changes are something I'm constantly looking to adjust. Even though I'm very happy with PHPStorm, I have VSCode and Atom primarily as a means to reevaluate my understanding on an ongoing basis. I realize for a lot of people "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is perfectly acceptable though and if you feel really productive, chances are you are.

[wyuenho]

> I think the most rudimentary concept that sold me on a proper IDE over an editor was syntax checking. Editors like emacs or vi may have better support for that than Coda or Notepad++ but knowing the script won't compile immediately vs deploying broken code and finding it there has more than paid for the difference. The most powerful feature of PHPStorm for me is setting breakpoints and having the Xdebug integration give me a peek at everything visually.

Emacs has had mechanism (flymake) to call out to a background process to lint code for decades now. Recently (as in since 2012), there's a new package called flycheck that reimplements flymake's functionality. Since then process-based linters have exploded. At least in JS and Python, you can do syntax check and possibly fix your code exactly the same way as most IDEs. Better yet, these linters update so fast, you generally get much better linting on Emacs/VI than IDEs. Updating these linters is just one command line call away, whereas in IDEs, you typically have to wait for months because they are embedded. The speed of improvements is just so much faster in simple text editors. The problem with Emacs and VI are not linting, but something so much more basic such as keybindings and window management.