Comment by imsnif

When I tried to get into programming as a teenager, I opened a graphical IDE and was immediately overwhelmed by a barrage of menus, popping windows and tooltips. This led me to believe programming is not for me. In later attempts I used vim (back then that's what people used to recommend those starting out with perl) and felt right at home.

These days I still use vim (almost stock) for everything (right now mostly Rust). This is totally anecdotal, but I'm usually more productive than my teammates - mostly because of the initial hurdles of getting into a new codebase or parts thereof. I don't have anything to set up, I just open it up and grep my way to success.

Every now and then I try to open an IDE and force myself to work with it a little bit just to be sure I'm not missing anything. The visual overload and lack of advanced editing are just too much for me. Going back to vim is always a breath of fresh air.

I'd sooner use nano/notepad.exe than any sort of graphical IDE (though I prefer vim).

I'm not saying this is the best way, I definitely do not recommend it to those asking me how to get into programming, but it's definitely the best one for me.