I try not to enforce Integrated Development Environments (IDE) on my teams. Some developers will give up their religion and home sports team before they drop their preferred IDE. My only ask is the code should build and be understandable outside of their chosen IDE. I often found most IDEs to be more of a hindrance and never to be a one size fits all. As result throughout the day I use multiple IDEs. Anything in Java I will do in Eclipse. I will use Visual Studio Code (vs.code) for tools like watsonx Code Assistant (WCA) in Go, Python, or other scripting languages. I like to use WCA for code comment generation. Yet, for the majority of my coding I use Vim.

Yes that default editor that comes with most Linux, Unix, and Mac distributions. Why… because it is there. My teams need to deliver Software in our SaaS environments and for customers to use on-premises. As I like to work on the front lines I want to use tools that are already there. This is why I don’t use neovim even though it is superior to Vim.

Now I do add plugins to Vim to support color syntax highlighting and autocomplete. So you may be asking why not just use the Vim plugin to vs.code? It is because I need to be used to working in a terminal window. As a developer you should overcome anything hard by doing often. So while I do use a plethora of IDEs, I choose to use the hardest often. That way I can be great at using the terminal editor which is nearly everywhere.