I’ve always lived in Microsofts big IDE Visual Studio, for all my programming purposes, because I developed .NET. Visual Studio is a monster of an application - it has its own quircks, but is generally regarded as a pretty good development tool. Of course all .NET developers swear to Visual Studio, because they really haven’t got anywhere else to go - leaving Visual Studio would sound like leaving .NET all together. And actually the experience in Visual Studio isn’t all that bad. Its got good code suggestions, great debugging facilities - but 90% of its features I either don’t know about, or selectively dont use.

I on purpose said that I “develop .NET software”, but not that I’m a “.NET developer” - because i want to emphasise that .NET isn’t the only programming platform that I’m interested in. I’ve spent many hours ín my own time, fiddling with other programming languages and runtimes, and I’ve found that the big IDE’s like Visual Studio isn’t always the best choice.

Tools for the polyglot programmer

I see my self more and more as a polyglot programmer (achievement unlocked - hipster programming word ‘polygot’ used). Meaning that I want to know about more than one programming platform and programming language. I believe that no one language and platform has got it all right, and learning multiple languages will make you a better programmer overall, even though you don’t use all these languages professionally. So I’ve looked into Nodejs and Ruby, and later more functional languages as Erlang, Elixir and Elm.

But looking into those languages, I couldn’t use Visual Studio - so i kindof had to jump ship to another thing.

Somehow I ended up on Emacs. I think it was because I saw a developer at a conference work through a test driven javascript example - and i just couldn’t believe the editing speed of this guy. Everything on the page was changing a lot faster than I was used to, and i really hate waiting on the editor. It turns out that these text-editors, has a lot of tricks that Visual Studio didn’t - and that they’re much easier to extend and customize, if they don’t have what you need.

Text searching and code navigation

The old big IDEs as Visual Studio relies a lot on mouse navigation, and most developers always have the source explorer open, so that they can select the right files. Visual Studio do have text search capabilities and code navigation, but they fall far short of what decent text-editors have to offer.

In my emacs-setup i have a few text-search options that are always available no matter what programming language, because they’re only text based. First of i can search through the files in a project, getting fuzzy matched suggestions thats updated as i type, by pressing a simple short cut.

The gif below shows how I can open projects and select a file in that project. First press a short-cut and type to search for the project, when selected i do the same for selecting a file in the project.

Next below I have coupled emacs with silver-searcher, (grep on steroids) which is a pretty fast text-searcher. Which allows me to search in all text in the project getting the same fast suggestions.

It may seem simple, but this fast text-searching, is often times quicker, than using a search that knows about the code, and supports regex if you need to match something more complex.

Project support

Most IDEs of course include some kind of project support. But these are typically based on a specific project-implementation as used in a particular language/runtime. As an example Visual Studio has its solution files and project files.

A text-editor as emacs isn’t related to a specific programming language, and therefore typically has basic project support in a way that can work in many language. The typical module thats used for projects in emacs, detects a project based on your source versioning as defined in a git repository or other VCS. This is easy and simple, and works rather well.

The trend is turning towards text editors again

Wiki describes an IDE as an integrated programming environment - and normally consisting of a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger. I remember making fun of those who programmed html in plain notepad on windows in the old days. But using a text editor isn’t at all like that - you can have almost everything an IDE has with your text-editor now a days - but you’ll need to tailor it your self.

A text-editor is good at… you guessed it.. editing text. But where an IDE usually comes preequiped with everything you need to program. An IDE can be setup to have everything you need - if you set it up - and maybe code a bit too.

Pros and cons of text-editors

So IDEs are typically tailormade all-included to support a single programming language or platform. This means that many of the language specific features will be included, as refactoring-support and inbuilt debugging without configuring anything.

But if you need to program anything else, it probably wont be supported, and you’l need to learn another environment.

Using text-editors, you typically get better text-editing and searching capabilities. You will need to be a bit more geeky, as you will need to customize it and maybe program it a bit your self (a lot if you choose emacs). And the more advanced language refactorings and features wont supported as well as the IDE.

I do find that I am more productive in a well customized text-editor, even if its with only the most basic language features.

I do all my javascript/typescript/html editing in Emacs, but C# programming is still Visual studio, as its still better integrated to this style of programming than the plugins supported for emacs. But there are people working on this, and one day i might be convinced to jump, and then I’ll be able to use all the other text-editing tricks in my C# programming, that i haven’t gotten now in Visual Studio.

Are you annoyed with your slow IDE? Try a text-editor, but give it some time and customize it to your liking before you decide. And if want to try something even more powerful and you really like programming - try emacs. :)