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amirreza heydari
amirreza heydari

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What are the best IDE for beginners?🤔

Please share your experiences with me, thank you

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Oldest comments (41)

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amirrezaheydari profile image
amirreza heydari

In my opinion, vscode is a very efficient, compact and powerful editor

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peerreynders profile image
peerreynders

IDE divide (2004)

As a beginner I would think that given how constrained learning time (and effort) is, learning to use a particular IDE (in any kind of depth) has the lowest priority. But that's just my opinion.

In the end you'll likely have to learn the IDE that's already in use by the team you are joining; that may be VS Code but that's not guaranteed.

Also being able to use a prevalent basic editor like nano in a text-only terminal (via SSH) can be incredibly useful.


powerful editor.

Completely off-topic: The Rule of Least Power - i.e. more powerful isn't always better.

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fjones profile image
FJones • Edited

Maybe it's because I've always had a bit more standing after joining the industry (was freelance and public service prior), but I've always had the option to use my own IDE. I've rarely found teams using IDE features that were a) unique to the IDE and b) necessary for the process. So there was (beyond licensing issues) never any need to strictly use the team's IDE.

Getting comfortable with an IDE is very useful insofar as it gets you comfortable with your own workflow, which you then need to integrate with the team's workflow. I don't think that's a consideration for beginners, though.

Edit: I very much agree on the closing point, though: Please, for the love of god, get comfortable with a CLI editor. No matter which, but using the CLI for things such as version control and conflict resolution is very very useful. I've stunned juniors with my decision to just open a shell on their PC and resolve conflicts in nano, because it just works a lot better for me than the IDE GUI tools.

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peerreynders profile image
peerreynders • Edited

Sharing basic competence over a common, endorsed set of tools (whatever individual preferences there may be) should lower the friction for collaboration among team members.

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fjones profile image
FJones

Oh, I do agree on that (hence the edit about using nano for conflict resolution). But generally I expect trainers or Senior devs to be able to cope with the difference or at least take the time to aid in figuring the details out. Using a shared toolkit is very helpful, but it shouldn't be a barrier to entry, is my point I suppose.

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jonaspetri profile image
Jonas Petri

I agree!

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jsn1nj4 profile image
Elliot Derhay • Edited

If you're just getting into things or you jump between different sets of languages (or even if you just want something relatively lightweight), this is definitely what I'd recommend. There are a lot of things it can be configured for just because of the ecosystem.

Since I know I'm gonna be in the PHP ecosystem for a while, I finally made the jump to PhpStorm. But I still have VS Code installed in case I want to try something else.

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sfleroy profile image
Leroy

Depends on what you are going to be doing. The jetbrains ones are excellent but not free. Visual studio community does a lot of things right and is free, but not great when doing heavy frontend development. If you are doing something like console dev then you don't really even have options, but if you are soon swift then probably xcode is your best bet. Like I said, it depends. You need to provide more information and when you don't, a lot of people with good info will pass you straight by for someone who is worth their time and effort more

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jeremyf profile image
Jeremy Friesen

Such a simple question with so much to consider:

  • What's your budget? Both monetary and in time to learn?
  • What's the kinds of work you do on a computer?
  • What's a few key tasks you want to accomplish in the IDE?
  • Assuming you have co-workers, what are they using at your company?
  • Does your company have any policies around editor choices?
  • What's your "tolerance" of your editor reporting telemetry to the "owner"?
  • What have you already tried?

The following article isn't about picking a tool, but it's about sharpening the tool you picked.

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simeg profile image
Simon Egersand 🎈

Depends on your level of ambition. Nano or Notepad are fine if you want to edit Wordpress templates. If you want to feel productive VS Code or any Jetbrains product. Vim or emacs if you're in it for the long game, or at least learn the key bindings. Whatever makes you feel productive. Personally I use Jetbrains products with vim bindings. Best of both worlds 😄

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laravelindonesia profile image
Laravel Indonesia

Atom IDE is awesome

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lyrod profile image
Lyrod

The only thing Atom is good, is for his color scheme 🌞.

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fjones profile image
FJones

That depends on a lot of factors. Budget and technology at the forefront.

The Jetbrains IDEs are excellently versatile and give an all-around consistent experience, but they're also fairly expensive if you're just dabbling in a bunch of different directions.

VSCode is probably the best allround choice if you're up to a bit of plugin fiddling and want to keep your options open.

It also depends on what you call "beginner". What's the goal? Getting deep into specific technologies? Playing with some smaller projects? Contributing pieces of FOSS?

From something as simple as notepad++ (or equivalent), to very specialized IDEs like Android Studio, there's a lot of options that work for a lot of situations very well.

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vulcanwm profile image
Medea

I really like repl.it and I've been using it for a long time!

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giuliopie profile image
Giulio Piepoli

I think VSCode is the best with a lot of plugins to expand its functionality

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Visual Studio Code is by far the best choice for most developers. My second choice would be Sublime Text.

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siy profile image
Sergiy Yevtushenko

That's an overgeneralization. For Java devs, for example, VS Code is far from the best.

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Fair enough I meant for web development 😄

If it was Python then PyCharm would get my vote. If it was C# then it would be Visual Studio. For the majority of programmers VS Code tends to be their top pick.

Stack Overflow 2021 Developer Survey - IDE

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spaboi profile image
SPABOI

Vs Code (multipurpose)
Atom (I would prefer for web development)
Jupiter Notebook (Python Beginners: step by step code visualization.)
Sublime Text
These are some of the text editors I used which I personally think are good for beginners.
But in the end vs code rules!

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jwp profile image
John Peters

Vs Code for TypeScript and Javascript, Visual Studio 2022 for C# and C++. JetBrains for Java.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 • Edited

Agree. I'd add:

  • JetBrains PHP Storm for PHP.
  • And that VSCode with plugins also works well with other languages and is perfect if you are into DevOps coding pipelines on GCP, AWS, GitLab, Jenkins...
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jwp profile image
John Peters

Yes the plug-ins. VS Code has the fantastic GitLens. It's a master Git command aide.

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lyrod profile image
Lyrod

VSCode only for quick edit.

WebStorm/PhpStorm for the rest. Jetbrains wins

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ademola_isr profile image
ADEMOLA OGUNMOKUN

Vscode

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toni777772 profile image
Anton Paliakou

IDEA

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scanepa profile image
Stefano Canepa

No IDE. I'm not joking, the best way to start developing or learning a new language is to use a simple editor.