> The difference is IDEs understand the underlying structure of the code, including relationships between entities, symbol types in their context, indexes for s

> The difference is IDEs understand the underlying structure of the code, including relationships between entities, symbol types in their context, indexes for searching, and so on. This is only true because purpose-built IDEs embed the tooling to do so, but nothing prevents said tooling to be extracted, to be used in any way fit by any editor or non-editor tool. Case in point: gocode/gorename, C#'s Roslyn project. > And unix can never be a very good IDE, comparatively, because "text streams" are not a sufficiently good data structure for representing program structure. The article is not about Unix as pipes of streamed data (which BTW can very well be binary) but Unix as individual tools that compose into a greater whole.