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Best IDEs

Joseph Maurer on May 23, 2021

There are tools to every trade and writing code is no different. I’ve posted in the past about the best code diff tools, but that’s only a small pa...
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Pedro A. Carrasco Ponce •

Jetbrains

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dbc2201 •

JetBrains has the best in class IDEs for all programming needs. Give it a try.

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Joseph Maurer •

I’ll give it a shot! I use their VS extension and like it a lot

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Matyi Csorba •

(caution: very opninionated comment) All of them is a good editor in my opinion, but none of them are IDE's. My favorite is Phpstorm (Webstorm with Php support). Sure it could be slow at first (when its indexing the files), but after that it has everything what i need, and didn't need to manage any plugins (Sure you can manage them easily in VsCode). Oh and the Angular support is awesome.
Ofcourse sometimes when i have to edit only 1 file, I use vscode.

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Joseph Maurer •

Thanks for your opinion Matyi. I use VS professional with JetBrains Resharper and love that combo.
I agree that VS code is great for smaller projects but really falls off once the project reaches a certain size.

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Harvey Thompson • • Edited

Emacs!

  • Emacs is actually a full programmable LISP programming environment, so you can change it to exactly how you want it. However see Spacemacs and Doom Emacs for easy starter kits that make everything work out of the box.
  • Proper Intellisense level auto-completion, refactoring for pretty much any language (thanks to the LSP protocol that powers Visual Studio Code).
  • Debugger support for nearly as many (thanks to the DAP protocol).
  • Edit and colourize pretty much every file format under the sun.
  • Full VI emulation if you like that (Spacemacs and Doom default to using this)
  • Supports pretty much every SCM.
  • Killer apps like magit (for git), and org (it's a todo list, agenda, calender, document markdown thingymajig)
  • Run a full colour terminal emulator.
  • Hands On Keyboard, Not On Mouse!
  • Browse the web.
  • Read e-mail and usenet.
  • View images, PDF, documents, markdown, HTML, XML.
  • Even make it your window manager on Linux.
  • Runs on every platform under the sun.
  • And much much more with packages.
  • Is totally free.

I've been using Emacs for work, play and code development for 30 years. I have barely used any other IDE.

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Joseph Maurer •

Thanks for the solid points Harvey! Tbh I’ve only used command line Emacs back in college and found VI or Nano easier to use. I just downloaded the GUI so I’ll have to play around with it 👍🏻 Apparently you can even play Tetris in Emacs 😂

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Mehdi Mousavi •

All three options are text editors, not IDE's.

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Joseph Maurer •

All three can do code completion, debugging, and syntax highlighting. VS also includes a compiler although I don’t think that’s necessary to be considered an IDE.

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Mehdi Mousavi •

yes, they can do almost everything. but it's not fair to compare them with real IDE's! at least they are not the BEST options! this is why for example Microsoft still working on a real IDE named Visual Studio (alongside visual studio code)

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Toel • • Edited

JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate hands down. Java, Go, JS ... great database development tool as well.