[jfengel]

I worked without an IDE for many years. I switched to an IDE when debuggers became reasonably seamless. My debugging cycles are much, much faster with an IDE. (Technically you don't need an IDE to use a debugger, but they're often linked.)

Having switched, the main use is refactoring. I can make codebase-wide changes correctly: I don't miss anything, I don't cause type errors that have to be tracked down, and I don't accidentally drop something or move a close brace that gets covered up in the reformatting.

There are a bunch of other things. It's nice being able to find the definition of a function rather than grepping for its name so I can pick out the declaration from amongst a mountain of invocations. It's nice to have it remind me of what order the parameters go in. And so on.

None of that prevents me from using vi and emacs, which I do sporadically. I don't forget how to debug with print statements. If I sit down at a new environment without an IDE installed I'm not lost.

I do wonder if being 23 affects your perception of this. The biggest benefits of IDEs come when you're working on large code bases with multiple developers contributing together. You simply can't maintain a detailed mental map of the entire codebase, if for no other reason than that things change out from underneath you. Not every developer will work on teams like that, but if you're working primarily on solo projects now, you may discover as your career progresses that you'll want to adopt new habits.

Every developer should be able to work without an IDE. But most of the time, they will be more productive with one.