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Do you use an IDE or a text editor

zokudu

zokudu

Diamond Member
This is just something I'm curious about. I'm taking a course on Java development purely for fun. In the course they are pushing us to use a Java IDE. Netbeans, Eclipse, Intellij etc. I work at a small company (Doing IT no development) that does a good chunk of web development and almost all of our developers use "hackable" text editors. Primarily Sublime Text. Just screwing around for fun I saw there are packages for Sublime to aid in Java development as well as a slew of other languages.

In general when developing in the industry do you work with a text editor extended with plugins or with a dedicated IDE?
 
Sublime Text 2 for Python, Eclipse for Java, Visual Studio for .NET.
 
I'm a fan of dedicated IDEs. They do a lot of the work FOR you, which is the entire purpose of using a computer.
 
I resisted using an IDE for a lot of stuff for awhile. I have recently though, stopped using Notepad++ for pretty much everything and using the IDE for things like XML, HTML, and Javascript. I turn off a lot of the autofill stuff. I pretty much just use it for formatting and compile / error stuff. It works wonders when working with packages you aren't familiar with. You can easily jump the to class and see what the overloaded methods are and what it returns.

Python, I still use a text editor, but I think that is about it.

The advantages of IDEs for actual code development are so vast, nobody could name them all. I'd hate to use a text editor for Java code.
 
Kind of embarrassing but a lot of the time I just use 'vim' :/ Mostly just bare-metal C though so not a lot of APIs to remember or anything like that.
 
For a language like Java or C# which were basically built for IDE usage, it is a no brainer. I use netbeans most of the day.

I can hit ctrl-o type in some camel case and end up at whatever class I wanted to work with immediately (no browsing the package structure). I can ctrl-click almost anything and arrive at the definition, the class, or the function call really quickly. For interfaces with single implementations I can single click into the implementation faster than I can look up what that is (or if there is one).

I can get usage graphs for functions to see if messing with this will break a lot of things. I can rename a function across the system with a quick ctrl-r. I can hit ctrl-space and get reasonable autocomplete for just about everything. Most of my methods are autofilled in with the values I want simply because the IDE can do argument type matching.

I get warnings when I do things that may be bad. My IDE can tell me "Hey, this value could be null" or "Yo, stupid, you said you would never return a null here yet the value you are returning is null". The IDE keeps me from making a lot of mistakes simply by highlighting them quickly for me.

I can autoformat everything to make sure that things look consistent. I can fire off unit tests for a single file to make sure it is working properly.

I use these features heavily and love them. If the language supports it, you can bet I'll go with it.

Now, if I'm doing some scripty language with no real IDE support, then I default to sublime, notepad++, or straight vim if neither of those does a great job at it. Though, I'll probably use the repl pretty heavily to get stuff done.
 
I love IDEs. The more powerful the better. IDEs are one of the few pieces of software I'm willing to pay for.

I love all the JetBrains products. I do most of my development in Java so I live in IntelliJ when developing.
 
For efficient code/text editing you can't really beat Vim. Plus it has a lot of plugins.

Various IDE's/editors have support for Vim (eg. Eclipse, Sublime, Visual Studio etc.), so you can have the best of both worlds.
 
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ikachu said:
Kind of embarrassing but a lot of the time I just use 'vim' :/ Mostly just bare-metal C though so not a lot of APIs to remember or anything like that.
Click to expand...

Such a humble brag. "Kind of embarrassing, I just use VIM because I'm that cool" 😀

I mostly use RubyMine at work, but sometimes Sublime Text. I think I'm the only one who uses an IDE at work and get some flack for it, but the interactive debugger is far superior to Pry. I do think I'm going to switch to IntelliJ though -- although I mostly do CoffeeScript and Ruby, RubyMine doesn't support all the plugins so when I want to do something a little different, RubyMine acts like it's never seen code before. IntelliJ supports all the JetBrains plugins though -- RubyMine is castrated to pretend they don't exist.

IntelliJ is a great product and since you're doing Java, I recommend it.
 
IDEs. For .net, visual studio does so much automatically for you it can increase productivity by 30%. For Java Eclipse probably increases it by 20%.
 
IDE & plugins: I use IntelliJ for Java & web development (e.g. Javascript, HTML, XML, etc). I was a fan of Netbeans prior to starting in the field, but abandoned it in favor of IntelliJ. If I couldn't use IntelliJ would probably return to Netbeans because I just can't get into Eclipse. For .NET definitely Visual Studio.
 
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I use GVim most of the time. For one Java project several years ago, I used Netbeans and eventually grew to like it for Java. But I don't do much Java these days. I never liked Eclipse.
 
vim/gvim.
sublime text is for hipsters.
i'd probably use VS with viemu plugin, but you can't use plugins with express versions.
 
I prefer using a tabbed text editor, Notepad++ in Windows and Kate in Linux. Vim if I'm sshed into a server and need to make a quick edit to something, but for real programming I want a full blown GUI editor where I can quickly copy and paste stuff around, delete/select, have multiple tabs open, quickly move through documents etc.

Not a big fan of IDEs, I find they just bloat the entire coding process. I like to do my editing in a text editor with tabs then just run a simple command to compile and/or run and not have to deal with making a "project" or what not. Especially for smaller apps, I just don't want to be bothered with that. Quick g++ command and compiled, done.
 
roror said:
vim/gvim.
sublime text is for hipsters.
i'd probably use VS with viemu plugin, but you can't use plugins with express versions.
Click to expand...

Thanks, dude. Where do I pick up my skinny jeans? Do they make them to fit 54 year-old guys?
 
Thanks for the information everyone. I've been using IntelliJ with the free student ultimate license. It's seems to work really well and I was just curious if there would be any advantage moving to a text editor with plugins, which it seems like there isn't.
 
Notepad++ for text/log files, Netbeans and Eclipse for everything else. Netbeans and Eclipse cover crazy number of scripting and 'real' languages and platforms.
 
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