IDEs promise a lot, and in many cases they deliver at least some of them. But they're all or nothing: to benefit, you must use their text editor, their debugge

IDEs promise a lot, and in many cases they deliver at least some of them. But they're all or nothing: to benefit, you must use their text editor, their debugger, their supported suite of compilers, their documentation browser, their everything. A trend has emerged recently: editor-agnostic language oracles. These tools expose an IPC interface for querying, and in some cases even mutating (i.e. refactoring), source code. They often incorporate a compiler so the type information you get is perfect, and exactly what the compiler sees. Integration with the programmable text editor of your choice (vim, Emacs, Atom, Sublime Text, VSCode…) is a simpler matter of making the right IPC calls. I think this is the sweet spot. I would hate to be locked into an IDE's poor text editor or buggy interface just because they offer some convenient tools. Some examples of editor-agnostic tooling: * CIDER for Clojure and ClojureScript (via weasel or figwheel). The primary editor plugin is Emacs, but vim and Sublime Tex support exists outside the main repository. * rtags and ycmd for C and C++ * tern for Javascript * racer and RLS for Rust * eclipse.jdt.ls for Java * guru for Go Microsoft has even created a protocol for these daemons to follow, which makes editor integration even simpler: https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/Protocol-Implementations https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/P...