DEV Community

Discussion on: Why I Deleted My IDE; and How It Changed My Life For the Better

Collapse
 
c4augustus profile image
Christopher Augustus

Total agreement. But then I also do multi-app, multi-platform, and multi-service development most of the time. I ditched IDE's for vim and bash scripts long, long ago. Mainly because I was tired of having to relearn keystrokes for each toolset. vi is everywhere and once you learn it, you are good to develop everywhere. Even when I use an IDE--which is pretty much just for integrated debugging and API-call completion--I'm usually simultaneously editing the files in vim. I'm also fond of my collection of different syntax colors for each language. For refactoring, my own custom "findgrep" and "findsed" bash scripts work just fine. Moreover, it's nice when the filesystem layout is your project structure. Many IDE's create a parallel-but-not-the-same project structure (looking at you Xcode) which just double the complexity of project organization. Using the bash command-line directory stack via aliases for dirs (d), pushd (pd), and popd (od), provides rapid navigation while working. Given all that, I'm actually working on Rust integration into Android Studio because deploying and debugging on a device is much easier with it. But I still edit the files in vim ;-)