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by jonathankoren 1450 days ago
Code search and an debugger that isn’t a pain to use are the main advantages of an IDE.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the build and code repo tooling ever work on any professional codebase I’ve worked on, save one.

2 comments

> I don’t think I’ve ever seen the build and code repo tooling ever work on any professional codebase I’ve worked on, save one.

Yeah I agree though in my experience it is because professional teams are usually infected by at least a few "everyone just uses Vim and a terminal right?" people who then go about turning the build system into some horrible script based system that IDEs can't work with.

>Code search

Use grep or ag

>debugger

What's so painful about it?

Grepping and entire code base just to find where some class is defined is certainly doable (I do it often), but it’s not as nice as just right clicking “Go to definition”. Especially in very large codebase with multiple git submodules.

No one serious would assert that inspecting complex data structure, managing breakpoints, stepping through code, or debugging remotely via text mode gdb like it’s 1986, is as easy or efficient as simply using a GUI in 2022, or even 1992.