Better text editors (at the time especially) were complicated learning projects themselves. Having a brain-dead editor with a couple buttons that just works (even if editing is not extra powerful) is a feature in the design case - total n00bs learning.<p>When new folks show up at the local makerspace the most common thing we encounter are people with no electronics and no coding experience. Their computer experience has been fairly non-technical up to then. Getting them up to speed on blinking a light already requires and intro to electronics and an intro to coding, kind of overwhelming for them to begin with. Requiring a &quot;deep IT&quot; dive to have extra editor-fu and installing toolchains etc would probably be too much, and we&#x27;d never get repeats.<p>Also worth noting: Arduino didn&#x27;t invent their own IDE. They used an existing one - the same one that Processing uses. It&#x27;s the wiring IDE&#x2F;editor, so it was around prior to Arduino.