2 ms·

Consider the following: multi-tools, mess kits, and sporks exist, yet many people prefer using the specialized equivalents.

• coldtea 12y ago
  The analogy breaks very fast, as people who prefer the specialized equivalents don't go sticking tons of smaller pieces together to try to make them resemble a multi-tool functionality, whereas Vim and Emacs users do add tons of plugins to get IDE like behavior. FWIW, I think the aversion to IDEs is bogus -- unless it comes from people who don't install plugins on their Vim/Emacs. If they do, then their problem is not IDEs per se, but how popular IDEs are implemented. The gist of an IDE is "having all the functionality in one place": edit, search, refactor, browse code, scm, REPL, build, etc. People loading Vim/Emacs with plugin try to build the same thing essentially. The problem with IDEs is not their "IDE-ness" but: 1) they lack a decent, fast, editor component. 2) they are slow to load and memory hogs. Nothing of the two is inevitable. Just an issue with current implementations. For (1) we can image an ide with a full Vim component, for example, as it's editor part. For (2), the problem is that both 2 popular IDEs (Eclipse, Idea) are built with either Java (which is crappy for GUIs), or have a messed up GUI like Visual Studio.