Hi experienced devs , I am a beginner programmer. I mostly use code completion and go-to source , and rename function and objects, code-pretty. Other features not so much. What features do you use often And what features are not that useful in an IDE and can be considered bloat? P.S.- Which is that one feature that you can’t live without?( sorry for sounding like tiktok wannabe)

  • Tom
    2·
    1 year ago

    I think that’s a fair argument. PICO-8 definitely could be called a primitive IDE. I think it’s closer to being a primitive game engine with so much of its focus being on graphics and sound tooling.

    While you can code simple things within PICO-8, I’ve found that as I’ve built bigger things, I work better in an outside editor, even if it only gets me smaller fonts, splitable windows, vim bindings, limited linting, and somewhat broken code completion.

    This isn’t a criticism of PICO-8 as an environment. I think there are a lot of strengths in its simplicity, especially for beginner coders.

    I tend to make a distinction between a customizable editor with some support for a language (like vim+plugins) vs a dedicated all-in-one tool that fully understands the language and environment (IDE). PICO-8 is hard to place on that spectrum given it’s an all-in-one tool, but switching to a modified editor gives you more features.