Can editor make you a better developer?

#editor #ide #vim #emacs

I was attending a tech talk the other day. The speaker was an experienced developer from Silicon Valley working at a fancy company. Mostly it was a very interesting and informative talk.

One of his thoughts make me think a lot and write this post.

"The best persons/developers I've ever met were using vim of emacs."

Whenever I tried to use vim or emacs I ended up thinking that instead of memorizing dozens of key combinations I could sharpen my skills as a developer.

So does vim or emacs really make you a better developer?
Does it mean that preferring IDEs makes you less curious about how technologies work?

Top comments (9)

Alain Van Hout • Sep 9 '18 • Edited

I'd argue that by spending less time configuring and learning an editor, you have more time to actually focus on the code and architecture itself.

Note that things like code completion, method extraction, and all the things filed under 'intellisense', are perfectly doable by the human brain, but those tasks can be done/automated more accurately (i.e. with less errors) and with less effort by your IDE. That's essentially devops-before-devops.

tux0r • Sep 9 '18

Note that things like code completion, method extraction, and all the things filed under 'intellisense', are perfectly doable by the human brain, but those tasks can be done/automated more accurately (i.e. with less errors) and with less effort by your IDE.

Then again, the less you "need to" do yourself, the less you will understand about what happens. Never underestimate the laziness of your brain.

Alain Van Hout • Sep 10 '18 • Edited

I never do. It's a significant contributing factor to humanity having the technology we have.

varo manukyan • Sep 10 '18

Well, I can see what you're saying.

varo manukyan • Sep 9 '18 • Edited

Thanks for commenting Alain!
I agree that human brain can handle those tasks but people build machines, robots to make some trivial tasks for them. Why shouldn't they do it?

Alex Lohr • Sep 10 '18

One of the main things that makes you a good developer is experience. Therefore, people with more experience are more likely to be good developers. Also, these people with more experience have quite plausibly collected that experience over a longer span of time, and that in the time they started to collect it, IDEs were less commonly used than vim or emacs.

Using an IDE or a console editor won't make you a better or worse developer. So use whatever you want and collect as much experience and knowledge as you can to become the best developer you can be.