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> Who in their right mind has the courage to tackle a Java project without an IDE? /me raising hand I've used all the major IDEs on real projects for years at

> Who in their right mind has the courage to tackle a Java project without an IDE? /me raising hand I've used all the major IDEs on real projects for years at a time each, and so done years (often on the same projects) with just a quality editor and a set of external tools, and I honestly slightly prefer the latter. I'm effective both ways, but my observation is that my work is of better quality when working in a non-IDE environment. I fully understand that, as with most such things, says as much or more about me than about IDEs. I think a large element is that, not having auto-complete, I find myself reading more docs (increasing system familiarity) and noticing unergonomic interfaces sooner. The one feature I do miss is language aware navigation, but that loss is somewhat balanced by the lack of disruption when said navigation inevitably breaks, due to non-compiling code or working with new language features not yet supported by the tools.

missed-pos 5y ago
Can you tell more about tools you use? And what about renaming functions/variables...? It seems it's error prone without IDE/language server.
- Sindisil 5y ago
  Nothing fancy. * Vim or VSCode - essentially zero plugins in both cases - format on save using google-java-format - syntax highlighting turned off in Vim, minimized in VSCode - code folding disabled - quickfix mode in vim and error display/navigatin in VSCode set up * maven, gradle, or ant to build * browser open to JavaDocs for stdlib and any library I happen to be using (though I work very hard to minimize dependencies) * JMC, VisualVM, JitWatch, async-profiler, etc. for profiling I do occasionally still fire up IDEA to use the debugger or other tools, but rarely. As for renaming methods/variables, for the latter, scope will almost always be small, so rename is usually trivial. For methods, it's almost always easy enough to rename, rebuild, then fix the errors. I also typically use Vim for C programing, though there I often use cscope and/or ctags to somewhat smooth out navigation. Again, I do not have a problem with good IDEs, and still occasionally use them. I just don't feel a need for them, and often prefer working in a plain editor.

missed-pos 5y ago

Can you tell more about tools you use? And what about renaming functions/variables...? It seems it's error prone without IDE/language server.

Sindisil 5y ago
Nothing fancy. * Vim or VSCode - essentially zero plugins in both cases - format on save using google-java-format - syntax highlighting turned off in Vim, minimized in VSCode - code folding disabled - quickfix mode in vim and error display/navigatin in VSCode set up * maven, gradle, or ant to build * browser open to JavaDocs for stdlib and any library I happen to be using (though I work very hard to minimize dependencies) * JMC, VisualVM, JitWatch, async-profiler, etc. for profiling I do occasionally still fire up IDEA to use the debugger or other tools, but rarely. As for renaming methods/variables, for the latter, scope will almost always be small, so rename is usually trivial. For methods, it's almost always easy enough to rename, rebuild, then fix the errors. I also typically use Vim for C programing, though there I often use cscope and/or ctags to somewhat smooth out navigation. Again, I do not have a problem with good IDEs, and still occasionally use them. I just don't feel a need for them, and often prefer working in a plain editor.