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Ask HN: Is there editors and IDE crisis?

by iillexial on 11/19/22, 11:25 AM with 54 comments

• by ojkelly on 11/19/22, 2:34 PM

  One of the biggest developments, imho, happened in this generation of editors, the Language Server Protocol [0]. Originally from VSCode.

  What used to be the realm of the big chunky IDEs, intellisense/autocomplete, is now available to any editor big or small.

  And even better, the lsp’s are maintained by the language teams themselves.

  Wine yes, there’s 2 major players right now, there’s a lot of pieces about if you think you have a better approach.

  I think VScode will have staying power for a very long time, because it’s built on arguably the most used language. And so the pool of programmers to hack it, extend it, fix and improve it is truly enormous.

  [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol

• by nanomonkey on 11/19/22, 4:33 PM

  Weird, I was just having the opposite thought the other day. Emacs seems to be going through an explosion in productivity. There are so many new improvements as of late that it's hard to keep up.

  Byte compilation has sped things up, tramp makes working with networked drives a breeze, magit makes git a breeze, LSP (language server mode) is improving interactivity with your code. Org-mode is an amazing markdown language and knowledge base, task manager, etc. The documentation is good for just about everything I come across. Integration with slack, mastodon, gemini, etc. Even the games and browsers are nice.

  My friends that use vim seem to be comfortably moving along so I'm sure things are similar there.

• by beagle3 on 11/19/22, 3:30 PM

  Peak IDE happened in 1998 with Visual Studio 6 for C++, and it had been down hill from there. Everything available today (and since then) is clunky in comparison. I kept using it until 2007 and had to switch because of the need to move to 64-but.

  Computers today are about 20 times faster, and have 20 times more memory - and yet, all IDEs are clunky. VS6 on the common hardware of the time was ultra responsive.

• by cutthegrass2 on 11/19/22, 1:30 PM

  I don't perceive an IDE crisis.

  We've never had it so good! There are multiple options, most of them are "free" and they'll all get the job done.

  Each of them has their own particular quirks, but I wouldn't describe any of the mainstream offerings as "bad".

• by DoNotListenToMe on 11/19/22, 2:38 PM

  I recently started to use helix (https://helix-editor.com/) and it felt like a step forwards. A modal editor, way faster than VS Code, and with a nicer design than vim, e.g. selection->action instead of action->selection.

• by worthless-trash on 11/19/22, 2:11 PM

  Yes, there is a crisis. The "Atom" editor is a good example of what happens when your editor is maintained by a business.

  The majority of people are investing in tools that wont be around in 20 years time. Emacs and vim are likely safe, not so sure about the rest of them.

• by przemub on 11/19/22, 2:43 PM

  I believe it's more of a desktop software crisis. I think that IDEs, for the large part, are actually the most active part of this sector.

• by gjvc on 11/19/22, 11:47 AM

  Jetbrains Toolbox is not to be feared, especially if you want to keep up to date with all the latest EAP versions.

• by eternityforest on 11/19/22, 1:48 PM

  VSCode has been fantastic for me, I love it. It serves 99% of my editing needs.

  The only IDE I like more is Android studio. If it weren't for the dang Storage Access Framework getting in the way, it would probably be one of my very favorite dev experiences ever.

  I don't know anything about Go, but I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode improves on that front.

  The other editor I occasionally use is Nano, usually to edit config files via SSH.

• by anxiously on 11/19/22, 3:12 PM

  I have been using Vim for 20 years. I have tried other editors and even gave them a fair try (1+ months of use) but always end up back in vim.

• by faebi on 11/19/22, 1:57 PM

  I think it's the opposite. Lots of developers seem to move to vscode. I have been using VIM for a decade and yet vscode also convinced me. The ecosystem seems to be striving. Ruby has been hard to integrate into any IDE and vscode seems to be able to somehow manage to convince the whole community to move towards a better integration. I haven't seen that before.

• by Oxodao on 11/19/22, 1:33 PM

  I've been using VSCode for Golang (3 years) & Python (1+ year) and I've never had too much troubles with it. It definitely not perfect but it does the job quite well. Jetbrains' IntelliJ Idea and Datagrip are still the best for other languages for me but yeah it's been a while since I've used any other IDEs.

  As far as I know Eclipse and Netbeans are still around and updated but they're not breaking the news so I'm not sure about them.

  As other said LSP are a big thing and even if they are mostly popular around VSCode and neovim's user they can be used with any other LSP compatible clients

• by night-rider on 11/19/22, 11:47 AM

  I use Notepad3 for everything. It even has a Linux version courtesy of WINE. Sometimes Notepad++ if I'm working with loads of files, and need to switch between multiple documents. The tabs are a life-saver.

  I've tried Sublime Text but never used any of their features. I mean, the features are cool and all, but sometimes you don't need all that cruft. You just want to code, without being 'helped' along the way.

  Vim and Emacs are for the hardcore. Many people swear by them, but I found them too barebones.

• by never_inline on 11/19/22, 3:39 PM

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, they all work pretty seemlessly on 1-2year old hardware, which I presume developers are using as well.

  On an old laptop I had, with a low end dual core AMD processor, low-end SSD and 4 Gigs of RAM, vim with LSP plugin was the only editor I could use very well. [1]

  On a new laptop, I don't have issues with intellij and vscode so far. I get more features than the old setup and that's nice.

  [1] - Of course LSP itself may consume some memory and performance. clangd, gopls etc.. worked well for me though.

• by peruvian on 11/19/22, 4:27 PM

  I'm happy with VS Code for Python. It does everything I need and it's fast enough — never had any major bugs with it. I keep my setup simple though.

• by henriquegogo on 11/19/22, 3:14 PM

  Vim with LSP (using CoC addon) is the most beautiful thing I could use to programming. It's the best part of VS Code with the best editor Vim.

• by karmakaze on 11/19/22, 5:37 PM

  I've mostly stopped caring about IDE capabilities. I'm good with having fast & precise text search, and a mostly working 'find definition'. A working source debugger is a plus, inserting prints & debug points is manageable. Even for git, I only use the IDE for 'resolve conflicts' because the JetBrains one is so good.

• by ColonelPhantom on 11/19/22, 1:26 PM

  I think the opposite is true; I haven't experienced much if any bugs in VSCode (although it's a resource hog), and other editors including Neovim can get a ton of modern IDE-like functionality with LSP servers.

  LSP has made it much easier to use something like Neovim instead of a big IDE without feeling like you're missing out on much.

• by anta40 on 11/19/22, 3:37 PM

  I still use an IDE for work, and that's the only free Jetbrains product: Android Studio. Of course, I'm an Android dev.

  Sometimes code in Go for backend dev. VSCode + a bunch of plugins work OK. Perhaps not super snappy like Sublime Editor, but still acceptable. BTW, I was a big Eclipse and Netbeans (for Java Swing) years ago.

• by luminouslow on 11/19/22, 1:42 PM

  Maybe im smoothbrained but VSCode works great for me and I mainly write Go. Lots of co-workers use GoLand and are very happy with it. A few are using vim and among those three I wonder what you are looking for? What bugs did you enounter with Vscode that made it unusable for you?

• by jonnycomputer on 11/19/22, 7:04 PM

  Well, there could be room for another competitor in the IDE space, though tbh Jetbrains and VSCode are doing a pretty good job on the whole. As for text editors ... well, there are a lot of really viable options out there, including, of course, Emacs and Vim, etc.

• by fxtentacle on 11/19/22, 5:06 PM

  I don't see any crisis.

  JetBrains IDEs do everything I want them to do, and on my 16-core Ryzen with 64GB of RAM, they feel as fluid as touching water. I tried recording things in slow motion with my phone and I'm pretty confident that my keyboard to screen latency is <20 ms. Nvidia gpu, 144hz screen, Debian

  That said, I did spend some time with their performance profiler after installing it and I generously increased IDE RAM limits.

  We do have a monopoly, though. Pretty much everyone I know uses JetBrains CLion. But before that, everyone was on Visual Studio. So this effective monopoly has been around for 20 years, but we switched winners in between.

• by solomatov on 11/19/22, 3:17 PM

  Is it VSCode for Go which is buggy (It's a Пoogle extension), or is it VSCode which is buggy? If you use neovim, you use gopls, right, is it less buggy there?

• by Obscurity4340 on 11/19/22, 3:51 PM

  CodeRunner's pretty great as both a text editor and fairly comprehensive IDE for many languages. Its on Mac tho might not be helpful

• by lern_too_spel on 11/19/22, 4:32 PM

  If VS Code is sufficient, emacs or a vim derivative is probably better. If it's not, Jetbrains is the only game in town these days.

• by RobotToaster on 11/19/22, 1:26 PM

  Eclipse seems to still be popular in some places.

• by tomjen3 on 11/20/22, 9:28 AM

  What do you mean jetbrains is too resource heavy? What’s the specs of the computer where you noticed the slowdown?

• by pjmlp on 11/19/22, 5:16 PM

  I keep using IDE as usual, what crisis?

• by gladiatr72 on 11/19/22, 12:06 PM

  Yes. Frustration. Stick with nvim :)