Editors versus IDEs

Over at the Hacking the Grepson podcast, Mike and Matt discuss text editors versus IDEs. The podcast was at once informative and annoying. On the one hand, they discuss the difference between a text editor and an IDE.

If you’re like me, your first reaction is, “What’s the problem? Everyone knows the difference.” That works right up until someone asks you specify what that difference is. Then we mostly fall back to channeling Justice Stewart and settle for saying we can’t define it “but I know it when I see it”.

Mike and Matt have a pretty good definition: it’s an IDE if you can compile, debug, and run the code from within the application. Of course, even that’s a little squishy. Is Emacs an editor or an IDE? According to Mike and Matt’s definition, it’s an IDE. I’m fine with that but others would disagree. Everyone agrees that Nano is an editor and that Eclipse is an IDE but there are a lot of editors/IDEs in the middle.

The annoying aspect of the podcast is that Mike and Matt act as if they were born yesterday. In discussing the ED line editor, they wonder why anyone would choose such a paradigm as if they’d never heard of a teletype and were unaware of how editing was done in the days before cursor addressable terminals—including, of course, the early development of Unix as this iconic picture of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie illustrates.

Even worse, from my point of view, is their dismissal of Emacs as a niche editor that has long since been eclipsed by VS Code. As I’ve said many times, I’m fine with the unenlightened preferring the bling and glitz of editors like VS Code but please don’t tell me that VS Code and other pretenders have supplanted the Emacs. The fact—as evidenced by Org-mode and Magit—is that Emacs is at the forefront of editor/IDE development. If you don’t understand and admit this then your opinions on the relative merits of editors is suspect.