The downside is losing access to refactoring, auto-fixes, integrated debuggers, auto complete, countless plugins, etc. Some of that stuff is nice & helpful. Som

The downside is losing access to refactoring, auto-fixes, integrated debuggers, auto complete, countless plugins, etc. Some of that stuff is nice & helpful. Some of it stops you from doing silly things. And some of it automates the detection and fixing of problems you would otherwise introduce without realizing. The latter is why it's important to use proper tools. Because introducing such preventable issues to any code base is just really not excusable for a professional software developer. Of course, tooling is better for some languages than for others. But even the ones you think are not that well supported actually do have some nice IDEs these days. Worth checking out such tools. Of course you can compensate with discipline and use command line build tools to tell you what's wrong and then manually look up the code location and fix all the issues .... or you could just autofix the warning in your IDE and move on to dealing with more interesting problems. As a good friend used to tell me, laziness is a sign of intelligence. In IDE terms, if you spend half an hour manually fixing something that a tool could have fixed for you in seconds, you are being an idiot. Or alternatively, if you can't be bothered to understand and use the command line tools available to you, do consider using an IDE as it will save you some time mastering those tools you clearly can't be bothered with mastering. It's the intelligent choice.