Comment by 8organicbits
1 year ago
This is my mindset as well. I often need to work with text that isn't code. Maybe it's a SQL dump someone sent me, some bespoke configuration format, a collection of log files, etc. Knowing how to manipulate and navigate text is extremely helpful as a general skill. IDEs degrade to notepad.exe quality when presented with unknown formats.
Personally, my recent work has been: short term freelance work, new code bases, a variety of programming languages including ones I haven't previously used, problem identification and solving, and mature code bases where you'd only write a couple lines of code a day.
In that context an IDE optimizes a tiny part of the work, while getting in the way for everything else.
I'll add that when I worked on a greenfield Java project as part of a large team, I absolutely used an IDE (IntelliJ at the time) and couldn't imagine working differently.
Thank you. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because I (mostly) hate autocomplete; it mostly just gets in my way. I do almost everything in Sublime Text with very few plug-ins. At the same time everyone around me is using the latest VS Code and going on and on about how great it is when you just hit tab and it writes the code for you. It makes me feel like I’m wrong in some way.