IDE vs Text Editor
IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ are superior to Text Editors like vi, emacs on following two major contexts in debugging.
Debugging
- Navigating the code path including dependent libraries
- 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.
