Why to understand your IDE: Integrated Development Environment

Divya Nagar
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

IDE: an extension of your hand. It helps in making your life easy. Be it adding plugins, running the program, auto completion, auto formatting and many more.

If we see all these things from another perspective, our IDE features stops us from being aware of underlying concepts. When you simply add a plugin using your IDE, you never know in which directory the files are going. When you run a program with the help of your IDE, you do not get the information about what is happening behind the scene. How and from where the dependencies are getting resolved?

Though you should use IDE automation as it is there to make you more productive. But use it when you know how it works. It is an automation, not auto-magic. In programming world, magic doesn’t happen and if it is happening with you, then you don’t know the concept. Now why is it important? If IDE is doing the job let it do, why bother about it?

The reason is, when you know your IDE, you can control and customise it according to your needs. The more you know the latent principles of your IDE, the better you become at it. Understanding your IDE can increase your productivity significantly. So how do we get all these information? How do we understand these underlying concepts?

What I found is whatever you do from your IDE, you should be able to do it from the command line. In your IDE, you just write library name, click on install, and it does the job for you. To understand it better just try writing a script to install libraries for your project and to run the code. Whenever you start with you IDE, try to avoid automation for few weeks.

Taking shortcuts might help you initially but it will paralyse you eventually.

    Divya Nagar

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