[Alifatisk]

You know what I don’t like about some IDEs? Either they are too heavy, or does a lot of work under the hood that people take for granted.

I’m a bit scared that I will get so used to it that I’ll depend on it and forget whats happening in the background.

I’m not stating this is a fact but rather the reason why I choose to not use these full blown locked-in IDEs.

[user3939382]

The automatic things it really helps with IMHO is: debugging, code navigation, and inspections. You can always do code nav with string searches and debugging with print statements, it’s just a lot slower. The inspections keep your code style consistent but ultimately without them, if they caused a real bug you’d find it from your tests.

[LaGrange]

...all of that is easily accessible in open source text editors. And in my experience it's also much more reliable, _and_ it's one less subscription.

[user3939382]

No it’s not. I use a tool called EA Inspections Extended extensively. There are a couple tools sorta-kinda like it in theory but really no comparison. This keeps your code very neat and clean and automates the cleanup. You’d spend a massive amount of time doing what it does manually.

[dijit]

I feel though that there are a few languages which are designed purely for IDEs, I can’t imagine writing C# or Java without an IDE.

C++ or Python on the other-hand? IDEs become more of a preference in my opinion.

[Alifatisk]

My feelings stems a bit from what I experienced a while back.

I was helping my friend with his project (a Java project with a testing framework, forgot the name of it).

I told him to try vscode because it's lighter and flexible! While trying to setup his environment, we could barely get the whole project up and running, the tests could barely run and there was always some kind of hidden issue with the environment and he had no idea how the tests worked under the hood because his IDE did all the work.

He just had to press a green play button to run the tests and the IDE did everything.

I don't want to experience that, I want to have full control and know what does what.

[wenc]

Exactly this. C# (and Java but I have less experience there) was designed for an IDE, otherwise one spends a lot of time editing metadata files). That's why to use C# productively, one essentially has to learn the IDE (VS or Rider).

But once you do, the IDE gives you a lot of stuff for free. Project-wide refactoring, artifact management, project-wide type-checks/completions, impeccable visual debugger, visual form designers, etc. You can do all this from the CLI but it's just a pain.

(caveat: my experience was pre-.NET core. .NET core may have simplified all of this)

[Alifatisk]

> C# (and Java but I have less experience there) was designed for an IDE

Really?

[wenc]

Absolutely.

[bigbillheck]

> forget whats happening in the background.

I'm willing to bet that whatever your usual tech stack is there's an awful lot going on the background that you've forgotten or never knew.

[Alifatisk]

I bet you've got a valid point, I'm a Rails developer so there is A LOT happening under the hood, but I am free to use any text editor as I like while working in the codebase.

Even Sublime or Vscode is enough!

[zo1]

There is nothing special happening in the background. What exactly are you worried about "forgetting"?

[Alifatisk]

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37371918&goto=threads%...