[hallgrim]

Knowing a bit of emacs has helped me a lot when fixing code on servers via shell.

I also think that while learning, writing code in an even more primitive editor (editor.exe) could prove beneficial.

But apart from all that, being a self-taught programmer, the JetBrains IDEs (pycharm, rider, IntelliJ) have significantly improved my skills and saved me tons of time by highlighting potentially problematic lines (“you are using that iterator twice, be careful!”). It has made me research topics I might have taken hours to find out for myself. It encourages frequent and easy renaming of variables and functions across the whole project, which has allowed me to be more flexible and maintain sensible names for things even after changes. It encourages consistent naming, too. It makes navigating code throughout the whole project a breeze. And basically any of the gazillion of features can be assigned a keyboard shortcut.

Plus, if I’m spending 8h every day staring at code, I rather look at a UI nicer than the command line tbh., but that is a matter of taste I guess.

Also, something is to be said for being “able” to use a shortcut, and “having to”.

[jnxx]

> It encourages frequent and easy renaming of variables and functions across the whole project, which has allowed me to be more flexible and maintain sensible names for things even after changes.

This one is really a good thing, I agree. Which seems to require a language server integration package for Emacs - AFAIK there exist two of them by now.