I’m relatively new to programming, I’ve been learning C on linux using nano and it’s been very fun. I’ve recently fallen into the emacs/vim rabbithole and I’ve been watching videos about emacs, Doom, spacemacs, neovim and reading comments about people switching from this or that to another config or editor, and I’ve been a bit lost on what to do. Then I realised that I haven’t done any coding and spent all of my time focusing on editors. So here is my question (which has probably been asked many times) : what is the point of investing so much time learning all of this when there are some IDEs that are preconfigured with all the functionality a programmer would need ? Does learning neovim or emacs actually save time in the long run? I know that they’re much more lightweight than IDEs and I’ve been really enjoying using the terminal much more than my time on IntelliJ, but having an easy out of the box visual debugger, refactoring and jump into functions can be really helpful in the long run I think, especially when starting to write actual large programs. Nano is fun, but not a time saver. Why did you chose your editor?

  • Kogasa
    1•1 year ago

    I used NeoVim exclusively for years with a workload consisting of typical Linux use (config files, scripting) and LaTeX. When I switched to a heavy software dev workload I started using JetBrains IDEs and find them invaluable for all projects that span more than one or two small files of code. I still use NeoVim daily for config files and scripting. So I guess that’s what I recommend: learn (n)vim, use it as a text editor and when you aren’t sitting down for a full development session. Use an IDE otherwise.