What's missing here is the programming language. There are incredibly flexible, concise, low-ceremony languages, with implicit types where placing an IDE betwe

What's missing here is the programming language. There are incredibly flexible, concise, low-ceremony languages, with implicit types where placing an IDE between you and code kinda obfuscates them. These are the languages where I think the best representation of code is the code itself. Then there are elaborate, verbose, high-ceremony languages with explicit types, where looking at code and keeping up with ceremony might be a bit overwhelming. For those languages you probably want a lot more automation and a variety of info representation that goes way beyond code. I'd go out on a limb to say that everyone here who likes/dislikes IDEs will split almost perfectly among those two language categories.