Renato Athaydes has an interesting post about his use of IDEs and how they are resource hogs and have a hard time operating on any but the most high powered machines. Most of you know by now that I’m not a fan of “IDEs”. That may seem strange given that Emacs is the apotheosis of an IDE. IDE, after all, stands for Integrated Development Environment and Emacs is nothing if not that. It integrates just about everything a developer needs to do including editing, compiling and testing, debugging, version control, RSS and News feeds, Email, documentation, and much more.
But when I hear the term IDE I immediately think of monstrosities like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and VS Code. Images of those stupid completion boxes popping up as I type come to mind and make me shudder. I’ve always felt that if you know the language you’re writing in, you don’t need your editor trying to autocomplete everything as you enter it. To me, it just feels like it’s getting in the way. I understand that that’s a minority position but it’s mine and I claim it proudly.
That brings us back to Athaydes’ post. He’s a dedicated IntelliJ user and wouldn’t consider using anything else for his professional development. For his personal work, though, he uses a lower powered 2019 MacAir and IntelliJ became unusable. Therefore, he turned to Emacs for that computer. He found that in most respects it was a good IDE but he didn’t like it as much as IntelliJ.
My laissez faire attitude about the choice of editors is well known so I have no problem with Athaydes’ choices but I really don’t understand why someone would choose a heavyweight editor that pops up annoying messages, is not free in either sense of the word, and is not truly extensible instead of using Emacs. Still, different strokes for different folks as the Hippies used to say.