Programmer Humor

"it's a bit limited for an operating system"

My understanding has always been:

• Text Editor: just writes text, no formatting (other than line endings)

• Code Editor: A family Text Editors that have additional capabilities such as syntax highlighting. And optionally a plugin or extension ecosystem. (VSCode, vim family, Emacs, even gedit )

• IDE: An application that includes Code Editor functionality, but also includes tools for a building on given tech stack. This comes out of the box, are a "part of" the application, are peers to the code editor, and cannot be removed, but can optionally be extended through plugins or extensions.

I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that's just my opinion of course)

To expand on my point, I don't think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn't actually have the environment integrated.

Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.

You can't run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.

So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs

For me a web app IDE includes a DB manger, HTML previewer, etc.

A text editor edits text, an IDE is an Environment that Integrates Development tools.

Vim and emacs usually run in the terminal and require keyboard commands to complete actions.

It is most certainly not usual to run Emacs in the terminal.

although of course it's possible to use keyboard commands.

And you can use Emacs with a mouse.

Vs code has no integrated environment though, it's just a text editor that supports plugins, you still need to install python or node or .net or Java or gcc, etc.

As far as vim requiring keyboard commands, that's really only the case if you leave mouse mode off

set mouse=a

And of course, to muddy the water further, we have tools like https://helix-editor.com/ which, more closely approximate vs code, while happening to live in a terminal.

I maintain that in order to qualify as an IDE and not a glorified text editor, you must be able to, out of the box, without external dependencies, run and build the code it was built for (idea/visual studio) otherwise it's not very integrated, and I don't think you need to have nice graphics for that qualification.