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Vim is the only tool I've been able to use at every place I've ever worked at, from intern to staff engineer in three FAANG companies. I've watched tool teams s

Vim is the only tool I've been able to use at every place I've ever worked at, from intern to staff engineer in three FAANG companies. I've watched tool teams spend months integrating the latest GUI editor, only for it to get killed by corporate acquisitions and replaced with N+1 that offers an almost identical feature set. Meanwhile there's always a community of vim and emacs users who build all the internal integrations by themselves. Vim and Emacs aren't editors, they're platforms and communities, and the benefit of using them over VSCode of JB is that you get to be a part of these communities that attract the best talent, give the best troubleshooting advice, and share advanced configurations for everything and anything you could possibly ever want. They are programmable programming environments first and foremost, and that attracts people who are good at programming and like to hack on stuff. Technologists who choose the propriety path of least resistance when it comes to their most important tools I think are ultimately missing out in a lot of ways, least of all is the actual editing experience. A craftsman should understand his tools inside and out, and picking something you can't fully disassemble and doesn't have the breath of knowledge a tried and true open source tool ultimately becomes just as frustrating as the initial learning curve of these older tools.

cies 3y ago
> that attract the best talent I've seen hugely talented folk on vim/emacs/emacs+evil, and on VSCode/JB. I think was the latter tools do, it make some of the advantages of being proficient in vim/emacs/regex available with less learning curve. Currently there are some combinations that simply best-in-class: VSCode+TS, JetBrainsIDEA+Java/Kotlin, VisualStudio+MicrosoftGuiStuff. vim/emacs may come a long way in these areas, but cannot beat the integration level offered in these combinations. Also, you mention "proprietary", but JetBrainsIDEA and VSC are opensource to some extend, which does improve community imho. But, the fact that they are less "open access innovation" projects, and more company owned is clear to everyone. Finally: AI will come to software devt, and I wonder if AI tools will ever be available on true open access innovated IDEs.
- softirq 3y ago
  > I've seen hugely talented folk on vim/emacs/emacs+evil, and on VSCode/JB. I think was the latter tools do, it make some of the advantages of being proficient in vim/emacs/regex available with less learning curve. Take Reddit and Hacker News as a fitting analogy, a community with a higher barrier to entry/more niche will be smaller, but the quality is vastly improved. There's still going to be people who sit in both communities, and smart people in both, but it's not controversial to say that an initial learning curve tends to attract people who can pass the learning curve and are motivated to do so. Another great example is the linux kernel development process. > Currently there are some combinations that simply best-in-class: VSCode+TS, JetBrainsIDEA+Java/Kotlin, VisualStudio+MicrosoftGuiStuff. vim/emacs may come a long way in these areas, but cannot beat the integration level offered in these combinations. Integration in some ways, in other ways a terminal based tool that adheres to the unix philosophy is more integrated with thousands of tools than an IDE where every tool has to be converted into a bespoke series of menu items. Just look at fzf, git, rg, etc. integrations in Vim. They are only lightly wrapped and so the full power of the tool shines through, and it's easy to customize it to your specific needs, or add more tools. > Finally: AI will come to software devt, and I wonder if AI tools will ever be available on true open access innovated IDEs. In the same vein, AI tools that act as black boxes and are integrated in the same transparent way as git or rg in Vim at least allow the editor to remain full transparent to the end user, and leave the complexity in the LSP or bespoke tool. I really see no difference between how AI tools will relate to editing as LSPs do today.
  - cies 3y ago
    > Take Reddit and Hacker News as a fitting analogy In so many ways they are not, but I see why you come to this conclusion. Some overlap in users. To me opensource is "common good" stuff, HN and Reddit are "us playing on some one else's computer+software". All options have integrations, gits, fzf's, etc. And AI is not just "another black box", it's going to save you a lot of typing very soon. This is good: more time for thinking and crafting; less time for boilerplate-y stuff.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Er.... "VSCode+TS" ... wat? ITT: people who have not used tools they're talking about with confidence. Everything available in VSCode is available in (neo)vim, without a slow buggy UI, modals, misfocused elements, and crashes. All the LSPs used by vscode are easily available, including copiolt, full intellisense, and full LSP-backed code refactors/formats/etc.
FpUser 3y ago
>"Technologists who choose the propriety path of least resistance when it comes to their most important tools I think are ultimately missing out in a lot of ways" Nope. Not missing Vim. Live and let live
bmc7505 3y ago
The best part is, you don't need to choose between using IDEs and your favorite text editor! Most modern IDEs with proper plugin support can be configured to provide a superset of Vim's functionality. I personally use IdeaVim on the IntelliJ Platform [1] with AceJump [2] and haven't looked back. You can import many of the settings from your .vimrc and it interoperates fairly well with the IDE features. Although I prefer Vim keybindings and it is technically possible to hack together an IDE-like UX with ctags and LSP, the IDE experience is so much better I wouldn't even consider working on a large Java or Kotlin project from the command line. [1]: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim [2]: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump
- softirq 3y ago
  I think you missed the point of my post. The value of Vim/Emacs isn't the modal editing or key chords. It's the community and architecture, which you lose if you're still using JB with a frankenport of Vim on top. In fact, I think what you're suggesting is the worst of both worlds - a reimplementation of Vim on top of an already resource hungry and complicated IDE that's supposed to let you do things with a mouse. So you're left guessing whether something from real Vim will be the same in your Vim, plus you now have two competing environments for ways to do things, and you have to wait for JB to implement features that (neo)vim have already implemented, without supporting the opens source communities that did the work in the first place. You also lose the killer feature of Vim, which is being able to work over an SSH connection on any sort of device, even those that don't have a GUI.
  - maccard 3y ago
    > You also lose the killer feature of Vim, which is being able to work over an SSH connection on any sort of device, even those that don't have a GUI. In the last decade, I can count on one hand the number of times I have SSH'ed into a machine to do actual editing - and in every situation, nano would have been totally fine. Crippling my workflow so I can handle the most obscure scenarios that we've moved past for the most part, is not a good decision
maccard 3y ago
Changing IDE isn't that big of a deal. I would much rather have to spend a few days to relearn a tool every few years and to get the benefit of that tool, than accept a lower quality tool just to avoid a few days work. If you worked in C++, then visual studio has been around for 20 years - visual C++ for 10 years before that. If you use java, then intellij has been around for 20 years. Pycharm for 15 years. If you're writing JavaScript, I don't know what to say because the framework du hour has changed so many times in that time frame that I don't think the tool saves you much. > Technologists who choose the propriety path of least resistance when it comes to their most important tools I think are ultimately missing out in a lot of ways, least of all is the actual editing experience Equally, I can say purists or idealogists are so concerned with theoretical changes and breakages, and so afraid of the possibility of something changing that they miss out on game changing improvements to tooling.
- softirq 3y ago
  A person using Vim or Emacs has had best in class integration with the unix environment, modal editing, and remote development. Today, both editors have integration with VCS via fugitive or magit, fuzzy finding, LSPs, tree sitter, and code generation tools using LLMs. These tools have not stagnated, they've continued to evolve and stay best in class in many areas. So the "one tool is better than the other" argument doesn't really sway me. My point still stands that the community and open architecture are more important than any one editing feature. > Equally, I can say purists or idealogists are so concerned with theoretical changes and breakages, and so afraid of the possibility of something changing that they miss out on game changing improvements to tooling. Blindly following the crowd is also dangerous. Making choices based on principle is what allows good things like open source communities and solutions not swayed by corporations to exist, even though they might require more up front investment.
  - cmarschner 3y ago
    The problem with these tools is that despite having worked with computers for 35 years, I don‘t get them. My brain is not made for them. I only use out of the box vim when I work on consoles (which is still a fair amount of the time), I can exit (hey!), mark/cut/copy/paste (ok, yank!), save, and find/replace if I must. Everything else is just beyond what my brain wants to handle. A lot of Jupyter lab and some VSCode otherwise. I can‘t say I know all about those either. The last IDE that I knew pretty well was Eclipse, in about 2004. I even wrote plugins for it for my own use. That wasn‘t too bad for its time, I don‘t quite get why it got out of fashion.
kcb 3y ago
In my anecdotal experience the best developers are the ones that don't overly focus on their tools at all. One of the most proficient developers I've known was perfectly ok programming on a little square monitor with Visual Studio where the code window was 40% of the screen real estate. It doesn't have to be that extreme but it reminds of hobby craftsman who focus on having a garage full of the tools of the trade while never finding the time to work on a project with them.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  At some point in a developer career one shifts from a tool focus to a work focus. I used to be picky about my operating system and often would spend time making the tools that I wanted or preferred to use work within the project dev environment, as opposed to just using the tools my employer provided. It usually ends up just being easier, and if everyone is using the same tools then pair programming or collaborating becomes easier, too, as compared to having to deal with the one stubborn dev who insists on using Emacs on a Mac when everyone else is using Visual Studio.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    I think the benefits are when you already know the extent of your work and you can build tools to steamline you workflows. Now having something that you love working with instead of making you frustrated every day is very nice.
- smabie 3y ago
  This has been my experience as well. The most productive people are the ones who actually focus on the work instead of wasting time configuring a perfect editor.
winrid 3y ago
the ide is not more complicated than your customized Vim setup once you get it close to functionality (you won't). I use all keybindings anyway, so it's not like the UI adds anything bad? I switched from lightweight editors to IDEs many years ago and my productivity went up A BUNCH - even if sometimes it uses gigabytes of ram. so what? Even my old used machines have 8-16gb of memory now. I would honestly much rather hire people that work in IDEs than people that like to "hack" on their vi/vim/emacs setup. The number of times I've been in a screen share with someone while they're trying to code or debug something with Vim etc, it just feels so slow to watch them work that I get that embarrassed-for-them feeling.
nineplay 3y ago
Mileage varies, even the most ardent vim user I know gave up and switched to VS Code this year. It's just too much to try to keep up with when projects and technologies change. I've programmed in C++, Go, Python, Java, and Angular just in the last year. I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about. Then there's the associated tools - Kubernetes yamls, swagger, markup, Makefiles. In IDEs they are only one plugin download away. I love vim, I used it exclusively for years when I was doing C/C++. I still ssh into servers a lot and use it pretty much daily. Still, I'm far to lazy to try to turn it into my full time development environment .
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about. Well, I'll be the bearer of the good news, then! NeoVim has a native LSP client which unifies all auto-complete/navigation/formatting into a single plugin, only requiring you to install per-language LSP server. As for debugging, there's also DSP (Debug Server Protocol) which NeoVim doesn't have native support for, but there's a plugin for that.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    Emacs also has LSP support built-in with eglot and a good start for treesitter support.
  - josephg 3y ago
    There’s more to language support than LSP. I use vscode and IntelliJ these days. In rust, IntelliJ lets me rename functions and variables across my entire project. Or select a few lines of code and extract them into their own function. It’ll even figure out what arguments the function needs and call it correctly. I’m writing a paper at the moment using vscode and typst (a modern latex replacement). The vscode plugin shows me the resulting rendered pdf live as I type. I can click anywhere I want to edit in the pdf and the editing window will scroll to the corresponding source text. Maybe there’s ways to do all this stuff in vim but I never found it. I used vim on and off for 20 years and I barely feel any more productive in it than when I was 6 months in. As far as I can tell, IntelliJ is both easier to learn and more powerful. Making nontrivial software in vim just doesn’t feel productive. LSP is the tip of a big iceberg of features.
sunshowers 3y ago
VSCode is a significantly more pleasurable experience working over a 100ms+ network connection than either vim or emacs (this being the reason why I switched away from emacs/tramp myself).
- diatone 3y ago
  If you haven’t already, and I know this doesn’t hold up for GUI emacs or vim, but consider running them through https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
  - sunshowers 3y ago
    Mosh is definitely an improvement over ssh, especially for connections with lag spikes (and I use it for terminal sessions). But it's no match for VSCode.
bitwize 3y ago
Visual Studio Code is currently where all of the tooling effort is focused. For the best tools with the best integration you should be using it or, depending on language, JetBrains. These are easy to use and developers can be productive in them from the word go -- without extensive customization. Hell, if you open a file in a new programming language, VSCode will suggest plugins to install. You do NOT want to build integrations by yourself. You want to build whatever product you're building. The fact that vim and emacs users do this is yak-shaving that pulls precious time away from the task at hand and serves as a distraction for editor fetishists. Do not become an editor fetishist. Modern IDEs help you become more productive faster and give you more support for things like debugging. (You are using a debugger to inspect and analyze your code, right?)

cies 3y ago

> that attract the best talent I've seen hugely talented folk on vim/emacs/emacs+evil, and on VSCode/JB. I think was the latter tools do, it make some of the advantages of being proficient in vim/emacs/regex available with less learning curve. Currently there are some combinations that simply best-in-class: VSCode+TS, JetBrainsIDEA+Java/Kotlin, VisualStudio+MicrosoftGuiStuff. vim/emacs may come a long way in these areas, but cannot beat the integration level offered in these combinations. Also, you mention "proprietary", but JetBrainsIDEA and VSC are opensource to some extend, which does improve community imho. But, the fact that they are less "open access innovation" projects, and more company owned is clear to everyone. Finally: AI will come to software devt, and I wonder if AI tools will ever be available on true open access innovated IDEs.

softirq 3y ago
> I've seen hugely talented folk on vim/emacs/emacs+evil, and on VSCode/JB. I think was the latter tools do, it make some of the advantages of being proficient in vim/emacs/regex available with less learning curve. Take Reddit and Hacker News as a fitting analogy, a community with a higher barrier to entry/more niche will be smaller, but the quality is vastly improved. There's still going to be people who sit in both communities, and smart people in both, but it's not controversial to say that an initial learning curve tends to attract people who can pass the learning curve and are motivated to do so. Another great example is the linux kernel development process. > Currently there are some combinations that simply best-in-class: VSCode+TS, JetBrainsIDEA+Java/Kotlin, VisualStudio+MicrosoftGuiStuff. vim/emacs may come a long way in these areas, but cannot beat the integration level offered in these combinations. Integration in some ways, in other ways a terminal based tool that adheres to the unix philosophy is more integrated with thousands of tools than an IDE where every tool has to be converted into a bespoke series of menu items. Just look at fzf, git, rg, etc. integrations in Vim. They are only lightly wrapped and so the full power of the tool shines through, and it's easy to customize it to your specific needs, or add more tools. > Finally: AI will come to software devt, and I wonder if AI tools will ever be available on true open access innovated IDEs. In the same vein, AI tools that act as black boxes and are integrated in the same transparent way as git or rg in Vim at least allow the editor to remain full transparent to the end user, and leave the complexity in the LSP or bespoke tool. I really see no difference between how AI tools will relate to editing as LSPs do today.
- cies 3y ago
  > Take Reddit and Hacker News as a fitting analogy In so many ways they are not, but I see why you come to this conclusion. Some overlap in users. To me opensource is "common good" stuff, HN and Reddit are "us playing on some one else's computer+software". All options have integrations, gits, fzf's, etc. And AI is not just "another black box", it's going to save you a lot of typing very soon. This is good: more time for thinking and crafting; less time for boilerplate-y stuff.
mjburgess 3y ago
Er.... "VSCode+TS" ... wat? ITT: people who have not used tools they're talking about with confidence. Everything available in VSCode is available in (neo)vim, without a slow buggy UI, modals, misfocused elements, and crashes. All the LSPs used by vscode are easily available, including copiolt, full intellisense, and full LSP-backed code refactors/formats/etc.

FpUser 3y ago

>"Technologists who choose the propriety path of least resistance when it comes to their most important tools I think are ultimately missing out in a lot of ways" Nope. Not missing Vim. Live and let live

bmc7505 3y ago

The best part is, you don't need to choose between using IDEs and your favorite text editor! Most modern IDEs with proper plugin support can be configured to provide a superset of Vim's functionality. I personally use IdeaVim on the IntelliJ Platform [1] with AceJump [2] and haven't looked back. You can import many of the settings from your .vimrc and it interoperates fairly well with the IDE features. Although I prefer Vim keybindings and it is technically possible to hack together an IDE-like UX with ctags and LSP, the IDE experience is so much better I wouldn't even consider working on a large Java or Kotlin project from the command line. [1]: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim [2]: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump

softirq 3y ago
I think you missed the point of my post. The value of Vim/Emacs isn't the modal editing or key chords. It's the community and architecture, which you lose if you're still using JB with a frankenport of Vim on top. In fact, I think what you're suggesting is the worst of both worlds - a reimplementation of Vim on top of an already resource hungry and complicated IDE that's supposed to let you do things with a mouse. So you're left guessing whether something from real Vim will be the same in your Vim, plus you now have two competing environments for ways to do things, and you have to wait for JB to implement features that (neo)vim have already implemented, without supporting the opens source communities that did the work in the first place. You also lose the killer feature of Vim, which is being able to work over an SSH connection on any sort of device, even those that don't have a GUI.
- maccard 3y ago
  > You also lose the killer feature of Vim, which is being able to work over an SSH connection on any sort of device, even those that don't have a GUI. In the last decade, I can count on one hand the number of times I have SSH'ed into a machine to do actual editing - and in every situation, nano would have been totally fine. Crippling my workflow so I can handle the most obscure scenarios that we've moved past for the most part, is not a good decision

maccard 3y ago

Changing IDE isn't that big of a deal. I would much rather have to spend a few days to relearn a tool every few years and to get the benefit of that tool, than accept a lower quality tool just to avoid a few days work. If you worked in C++, then visual studio has been around for 20 years - visual C++ for 10 years before that. If you use java, then intellij has been around for 20 years. Pycharm for 15 years. If you're writing JavaScript, I don't know what to say because the framework du hour has changed so many times in that time frame that I don't think the tool saves you much. > Technologists who choose the propriety path of least resistance when it comes to their most important tools I think are ultimately missing out in a lot of ways, least of all is the actual editing experience Equally, I can say purists or idealogists are so concerned with theoretical changes and breakages, and so afraid of the possibility of something changing that they miss out on game changing improvements to tooling.

softirq 3y ago
A person using Vim or Emacs has had best in class integration with the unix environment, modal editing, and remote development. Today, both editors have integration with VCS via fugitive or magit, fuzzy finding, LSPs, tree sitter, and code generation tools using LLMs. These tools have not stagnated, they've continued to evolve and stay best in class in many areas. So the "one tool is better than the other" argument doesn't really sway me. My point still stands that the community and open architecture are more important than any one editing feature. > Equally, I can say purists or idealogists are so concerned with theoretical changes and breakages, and so afraid of the possibility of something changing that they miss out on game changing improvements to tooling. Blindly following the crowd is also dangerous. Making choices based on principle is what allows good things like open source communities and solutions not swayed by corporations to exist, even though they might require more up front investment.
- cmarschner 3y ago
  The problem with these tools is that despite having worked with computers for 35 years, I don‘t get them. My brain is not made for them. I only use out of the box vim when I work on consoles (which is still a fair amount of the time), I can exit (hey!), mark/cut/copy/paste (ok, yank!), save, and find/replace if I must. Everything else is just beyond what my brain wants to handle. A lot of Jupyter lab and some VSCode otherwise. I can‘t say I know all about those either. The last IDE that I knew pretty well was Eclipse, in about 2004. I even wrote plugins for it for my own use. That wasn‘t too bad for its time, I don‘t quite get why it got out of fashion.

kcb 3y ago

In my anecdotal experience the best developers are the ones that don't overly focus on their tools at all. One of the most proficient developers I've known was perfectly ok programming on a little square monitor with Visual Studio where the code window was 40% of the screen real estate. It doesn't have to be that extreme but it reminds of hobby craftsman who focus on having a garage full of the tools of the trade while never finding the time to work on a project with them.

SoftTalker 3y ago
At some point in a developer career one shifts from a tool focus to a work focus. I used to be picky about my operating system and often would spend time making the tools that I wanted or preferred to use work within the project dev environment, as opposed to just using the tools my employer provided. It usually ends up just being easier, and if everyone is using the same tools then pair programming or collaborating becomes easier, too, as compared to having to deal with the one stubborn dev who insists on using Emacs on a Mac when everyone else is using Visual Studio.
- skydhash 3y ago
  I think the benefits are when you already know the extent of your work and you can build tools to steamline you workflows. Now having something that you love working with instead of making you frustrated every day is very nice.
smabie 3y ago
This has been my experience as well. The most productive people are the ones who actually focus on the work instead of wasting time configuring a perfect editor.

winrid 3y ago

the ide is not more complicated than your customized Vim setup once you get it close to functionality (you won't). I use all keybindings anyway, so it's not like the UI adds anything bad? I switched from lightweight editors to IDEs many years ago and my productivity went up A BUNCH - even if sometimes it uses gigabytes of ram. so what? Even my old used machines have 8-16gb of memory now. I would honestly much rather hire people that work in IDEs than people that like to "hack" on their vi/vim/emacs setup. The number of times I've been in a screen share with someone while they're trying to code or debug something with Vim etc, it just feels so slow to watch them work that I get that embarrassed-for-them feeling.

nineplay 3y ago

Mileage varies, even the most ardent vim user I know gave up and switched to VS Code this year. It's just too much to try to keep up with when projects and technologies change. I've programmed in C++, Go, Python, Java, and Angular just in the last year. I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about. Then there's the associated tools - Kubernetes yamls, swagger, markup, Makefiles. In IDEs they are only one plugin download away. I love vim, I used it exclusively for years when I was doing C/C++. I still ssh into servers a lot and use it pretty much daily. Still, I'm far to lazy to try to turn it into my full time development environment .

bheadmaster 3y ago
> I can believe that there's vim plugins to handle all those, but the energy it would take to find auto-complete and navigation and formatting and debugging and any number of other out-of-the-box IDE functionality is more than I'd like to thing about. Well, I'll be the bearer of the good news, then! NeoVim has a native LSP client which unifies all auto-complete/navigation/formatting into a single plugin, only requiring you to install per-language LSP server. As for debugging, there's also DSP (Debug Server Protocol) which NeoVim doesn't have native support for, but there's a plugin for that.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Emacs also has LSP support built-in with eglot and a good start for treesitter support.
- josephg 3y ago
  There’s more to language support than LSP. I use vscode and IntelliJ these days. In rust, IntelliJ lets me rename functions and variables across my entire project. Or select a few lines of code and extract them into their own function. It’ll even figure out what arguments the function needs and call it correctly. I’m writing a paper at the moment using vscode and typst (a modern latex replacement). The vscode plugin shows me the resulting rendered pdf live as I type. I can click anywhere I want to edit in the pdf and the editing window will scroll to the corresponding source text. Maybe there’s ways to do all this stuff in vim but I never found it. I used vim on and off for 20 years and I barely feel any more productive in it than when I was 6 months in. As far as I can tell, IntelliJ is both easier to learn and more powerful. Making nontrivial software in vim just doesn’t feel productive. LSP is the tip of a big iceberg of features.

sunshowers 3y ago

VSCode is a significantly more pleasurable experience working over a 100ms+ network connection than either vim or emacs (this being the reason why I switched away from emacs/tramp myself).

diatone 3y ago
If you haven’t already, and I know this doesn’t hold up for GUI emacs or vim, but consider running them through https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
- sunshowers 3y ago
  Mosh is definitely an improvement over ssh, especially for connections with lag spikes (and I use it for terminal sessions). But it's no match for VSCode.

bitwize 3y ago

Visual Studio Code is currently where all of the tooling effort is focused. For the best tools with the best integration you should be using it or, depending on language, JetBrains. These are easy to use and developers can be productive in them from the word go -- without extensive customization. Hell, if you open a file in a new programming language, VSCode will suggest plugins to install. You do NOT want to build integrations by yourself. You want to build whatever product you're building. The fact that vim and emacs users do this is yak-shaving that pulls precious time away from the task at hand and serves as a distraction for editor fetishists. Do not become an editor fetishist. Modern IDEs help you become more productive faster and give you more support for things like debugging. (You are using a debugger to inspect and analyze your code, right?)