Do you use an IDE? What IDE do you use? If you don't what's your workflow like?

benjm-ma

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Jun 2, 2020
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Programming Experience
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Personally, I use a text editor and the command line. I'm proficient with vi and find it way too convenient as opposed to clicking around a UI. However, as of recently I have been using Sublime and really enjoy it. It has a "vintage mode" which allows you to navigate a file using vi controls. I could imagine with larger projects this method of developing programs would become somewhat impractical but I don't think I would ever change.

So, what IDE do you use if you use one? If you don't, whats your workflow like? I figure most people on here use Visual Studio but I really don't know.
 
Visual Studio (2019 Community), and as much I as love coding I prefer all the help I can get out of VS intellisense and formatting, and code generation by visual designers.
 
I'm a former vi junkie. Over the past 35 years, I went from the Borland text editor, to vi, to brief, to CodeWright, to Source Insight, back to CodeWright, to Visual Studio. I am now straddling the fence (yes, that can be pretty uncomfortable) between Visual Studio and VS Code. For times when I am doing more debugging or performance profiling, Visual Studio is my primary platform. For writing code and where my unit tests give me sufficient diagnostic information, I stick with VS Code.
 
Visual Studio (2019 Community), and as much I as love coding I prefer all the help I can get out of VS intellisense and formatting, and code generation by visual designers.

This makes sense, I could see one spending less time writing boilerplate code and more time on what matters as a definite advantage. I learn a lot about the build process and such without using an IDE, however I do feel as I mature as a programmer using an IDE for this functionality will really become more appealing to me.

I'm a former vi junkie. Over the past 35 years, I went from the Borland text editor, to vi, to brief, to CodeWright, to Source Insight, back to CodeWright, to Visual Studio.

Oh yea? What was it that made you seek other editors and finally an IDE? What are things you miss and don't miss about vi?
 
So the projects got bigger and bigger, running `ctags` to extract symbols got more and more labor intensive. And as I was getting into languages for which there was no symbol extraction tool, needed to start relying on the editor to do the symbol extraction. Each of the succession of editors had more and more powerful symbol extraction. The reversion from Source Insight back to CodeWright is because Source Insight did not understand conditional preprocessor commands like ifdef so it would show all symbols, instead of just the symbols which were active. CodeWright did. I only grudgingly moved to Visual Studio when my company stopped paying for external IDE's and code editors to encourage its developers to dogfood its own products. (Yes I was working for Microsoft at the time.)

The only reason why I wasn't using Visual Studio using all these other editors is because it took so long to startup to edit just one file. The way I learned to cope with Visual Studio was to just keep it open (ala emacs users).

What made VS Code so tempting was bare VS Code was very very fast to startup for quick editting. Alas with all the extensions people are throwing at VSCode, I might as well just keep it open all the time as well.
 
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