I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
Visual Studio Code is a streamlined code editor with support for development operations like debugging, task running, and version control. It aims to provide just the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle and leaves more complex workflows to fuller featured IDEs, such as Visual Studio IDE.
~ code.visualstudio.com
They’re just saying that so that they have a justification for making two IDEs.
I don’t think there’s an exact definition but broadly I would say if it has the majority of these features it’s definitely an IDE:
- Integrated debugger
- Intellisense
- Build/debug shortcuts that start the build in the IDE
- Parsing of error/warnings from the build output into a structured list that you can click on
If you make something with all those then it’s definitely an IDE. Without some of them it’s more debatable. For example the old Arduino editor… I would still say is a very basic IDE even though it doesn’t have a proper debugger - it has other heavily integrated development tools, e.g. the UART viewer.
