D IDE

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, September 3, 2018 12:55:01 PM MDT Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority
> > of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely
> > disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because
> > we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of
> > thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves
>
> Why is that? I've never used an IDE much, but I wonder why you
> don't and what your impressions are of why many other core D
> users don't either.

Because they can't hold a candle to vim. As far as text editing goes, there
simply is no comparison. The same goes for emacs. Most of the other
capabilities that a typical IDE has are either geared towards dealing with
boilerplate stuff that D tries to avoid or can be made to work in programs
like vim or emacs if you want them. Personally, I have pretty much all I
need with just vim, grep, and gdb. And I lose out on so much with any IDE
that there's no point in even considering using one.

vim and emacs (especially vim) have high learning curves, which scares off
plenty of programmers, but in general, it seems like most folks who actually
take to the time to really learn one of them won't go back to using an IDE
if they can help it, because IDEs are very, very poor text editors, and vim
and emacs (especially emacs) are far more flexible. Whether your choice is
vim or emacs, they both are total powerhouses as code editors, whereas IDEs
really are not.

This is an answer that I gave to a similar question on SO several years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2695919/why-do-people-use-command-line-instead-of-ide/2695956#2695956

- Jonathan M Davis