[Feoh]

I like the article as I am also a command line junkie, but I have an issue with it. I might be being pedantic here, but the fundamental premise of the article is a falsehood.

UNIX is in no way, shape or form an IDE. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment and means exactly that. All your tools under one roof.

I do not deny and in fact would also assert that the separate tool chain / everything is a stream of bytes philosophy can be used in amalgam as an incredibly powerful methodology for software development, but that doesn't make it an IDE.

[dllthomas]

I typically tweak my rc files for a particular task ($language development, packaging, communications, system configuration, etc) and spawn a screen session with my $HOME pointing at a context-specific directory. This makes everything integrate a little better around the task at hand, while still giving me the full expressibility of my shell. I don't know whether I'd quite call it "Integrated", but I find it useful.

[mkramlich]

> UNIX is in no way, shape or form an IDE. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment and means exactly that. All your tools under one roof.

agreed. if anything, it's a UDE: Unintegrated Development Environment. which is it's strength and weakness. the initial learning curve is steeper than with an IDE, maybe, but you don't run into these painful low ceilings like with an IDE. so much synergy & integratability in the CLI paradigm. pick and choose. customizable UX, custom workflows, automation, and typically much less opaque configuration, lower idle cpu and memory use, etc.