One IDE to Rule them All
Most developers are pretty strongly opinionated about the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that they use. I will probably be no different eventually, but right now I’m still struggling to find Mr. Right. My first enterprise IDE was Eclipse Helios, way back in 2010. Prior to that I used some gosh-awful Ada native IDE that the government used to program tank ballistics computers and nuclear missiles. Eclipse at the time was awesome by comparison. It even had plugins for subversion!
Then I got out of school and was out of the development scene for a while. When I came back to it I really wanted to get into Android. Lo-and-behold Eclipse had a plugin for Android development too! But then Google released Android Studio and all bets were off. Android Studio showed me what an IDE specifically built for a single architecture paradigm could do. But when I started to branch out into web development, Android Studio just wasn’t equipped for it without some serious hacks.
So I tried Brackets. That worked for a while until I started messing with npm, which seriously affected its performance. Atom was similarly slowed significantly as the web project that I worked on grew in complexity. So I went back to Eclipse, this time Neon edition. That worked for a while, but I just couldn’t get over all of the bugginess. I briefly considered JetBrains on the recommendation of my Coder Radio podcast, but quickly shelved it when I saw the $650 annual subscription price tag for the Enterprise edition that supports ES6/HTML5/CSS3.
Right now my favorite web editor is a tie between Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code. Both have strong plugin support and a responsive UI regardless of the project’s size or complexity. But I’m still using Android Studio for aOS development, Xcode for iOS development, and Intellij Community Edition for Java/Kotlin Spring Boot development. So ultimately I have to say that I’m resigned to the fact that there probably will never be a single IDE ‘to rule them all’.
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