[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.