Arguments against IDEs
I use vim instead of an IDE and I&#x27;ve tried lots of IDEs (Visual Studio&#x2F;C++, Code::Blocks, JetBrains stuff, Eclipse, VS Code). For more table setting, I also use a lot of linters and formatters (via ale), but I don&#x27;t use any autocomplete.<p>I don&#x27;t have any problems getting by with shell, sed, grep, and whatever debugger. I&#x27;ve debugged bonkers issues (gdb is super powerful), I&#x27;ve changed the names of things across huge codebases using sed, I&#x27;ve found all instances of things using grep, etc. I&#x27;ve written scripts to do these things and some of them I&#x27;ve reused (ex: I have a script that grep&#x27;s the output of git status to see what I need to add to a commit to continue a rebase and then runs that git command).<p>It did take time to learn, but I would argue it didn&#x27;t take longer than really getting to know an IDE. And now, I have pretty good knowledge of standard tools that&#x27;s broadly applicable to lots of other problem domains. This has been useful as I&#x27;ve had to dip in and out of data engineering in the last few years, but it&#x27;s also nice to just be able to whip up utilities to solve random problems that always crop up (does Funko sell some kind of Doug McIlroy talisman?).<p>As a result, I&#x27;ve always felt that IDEs were vaguely disempowering. I&#x27;m good at using *NIX on a variety of problems, and deploying these skills over the years I&#x27;ve gained a pretty deep understanding of how lots of things work (what makes grep fast, forking overhead, file descriptors, buffering on pipes and I&#x2F;O in general, etc). I can&#x27;t overstate the degree to which this has made me a better SWE. I&#x27;m not a PyCharm user or CLion user, I&#x27;m a computer user.<p>I don&#x27;t want to veer too far into &quot;IDE users are sheep&quot; or whatever; I definitely don&#x27;t think that. But for me, digging into *NIX tools essentially taught me about computers and software engineering, and gave me a broadly-applicable skillset that I use to solve bonkers problems all the time, but where I wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start in something like VS Code. A good example here is I was just rereading tptacek&#x27;s post on hiring (from also rereading the &quot;Misidentifying Talent&quot; post by luu) [0] [1], and he talks about one of the interview work sample prompts involves reverse-engineering a custom binary protocol. I don&#x27;t really know how I would do that in PyCharm (or whatever the Ruby equivalent is), but I would make pretty quick work out of it in Wireshark.<p>I think these arguments just come down to aesthetics. Some people think that IDEs are fun to work with in their GUI magnificence and find a vim&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;etc. system extremely opaque and tedious. Others think that it&#x27;s fun to wire your own system together to suit your own way of thinking and working, and feel suffocated and disempowered by an IDE. Use what you like, have fun, don&#x27;t yuck my yum.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;#worksample" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;#work...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;talent&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;talent&#x2F;</a>