IDE vs Text Editor

Docile Dionysus
Sep 7, 2018 · 1 min read

IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ are superior to Text Editors like vi, emacs on following two major contexts in debugging.

Debugging

  1. Navigating the code path including dependent libraries
  2. Inspecting all variables in the scope during execution

It’s clear that IDEs has an unquestionable win over Text Editors. Most popular defense point for using text editor is server-side coding. It could be unavoidable in cases like being dependent on immense datasets on server-side, because of legal/technical difficulties development environment cannot be on your computer.

On the other hand, modern IDEs like IntelliJ support rsync diff file for changes (which is a minimum size for data transfer) and remote code execution with capabilities of debugging from your computer.

Bonus: If you’re working in a codebase with +10M lines, searching is slow. IDEs have advanced indexing where searching and refactoring are much easier.

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