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Ask HN: Do you feel more productive with an IDE compared to Vim/Emacs?
3 points by cochne on Feb 10, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I've been using Vim for all my development for about 3 years. It serves its purpose and it's a pleasure to use. However I see a lot of people really love IDEs like VSCode. So for the people who have tried both and IDE and pure Vim/Emacs development, do you feel the IDE has made you more productive?


Not really. I used IDEs for five years (Atom~2yrs, Sublime~6mos, VSCode~2yrs) professionally and then switched to vim and I've been using that pretty exclusively for about a year now.

It really depends on more than just the editor you use. If you're using vim/emacs with common cli tools like grep, find, sed, awk, git, etc then you will probably be less productive with an IDE, at least without heavy customization, but if you're managing a lot of that functionality with plugins, then an IDE would probably be roughly on par for productivity.


Yes and No. They are not mutually exclusive.

I find that generally I'm much more productive in Emacs, so I use it most of the time. But I reach for the IDE when it makes sense.


Yes




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