Unix as IDE

This was how Unix was presented to me when I was first introduced to me. I was told it was like industrial machinery - designed for those who know how to use it, efficient, dangerous if you aren't careful. Which is exactly what a good tool should be. When IDEs (the kind that comes as a GUI'ed bundle of things thought to be the most appropriate for the purpose by committee of someones, somewhere) started becoming popular, I didn't get…

It's not for everyone, but the Unix/BSD/Linux shell is still my favorite command invocation environment. Despite their simplicity, pipelines are a really handy way to pass data between programs when solving certain kinds problems. It also provides a cheap way of providing some parallel processing.

I'm a terminal jockey and an i3 junkie, and for a long time vim+extensions+Unix tools were my IDE too... but ultimately there is a difference between a powerful editor used like an IDE, and an actual IDE. there are lots of features which get first class.attention in an IDE, which were just kludgy hacks in my beloved vim... and some that simply weren't possible. For example, VSCode Remote container development. The IDE is split into client and server portions, with…

Naming "not using an IDE" like this is an interesting idea for folks coming from systems like MS Windows. I'm a "Unix as IDE" guy for +10yrs, but noticed for some large projects that an IDE actually can make a big difference. I used KDevelop and Eclipse solely for 1. Code navigation. 2. Showing code/type documentation on mouse over. 3. Having 1+2 combined with a gdb frontend. Unfortunately, these are "in-editor" features and OS utilities cannot replace them.