5 ms·
It seems like the only distinction between an "IDE" and a "Text Editor" nowadays is that an "IDE" is slow to start up but a "Text Editor" is fast to start up.
by DougBTX 6y ago
It seems like the only distinction between an "IDE" and a "Text Editor" nowadays is that an "IDE" is slow to start up but a "Text Editor" is fast to start up.
Everything else that would be in an IDE historically (project browsers, intellisense, code completion, refactoring, integrated build and debugger UI, test runners, etc, etc) all show up in "Text Editors". The only question is how good that functionality is, which varies between editor-language pairs.
- EE84M3i 6y agoIn my mind the biggest difference is that in an IDE I need a stateful "project" or "solution" and with a text editor I don't.
- DougBTX 6y agoVisual Studio is very much an IDE, but it is perfectly capable of editing a single file too. I think the only reason people tend to use something else for single files is because it tends to be slow to start up.