I've been curious in the past, trying to find a reason to use an IDE. For me, the loose coupling of tools that you get when working with Vim in a console is priceless.

My trick (not really a trick) for efficiency is some simple key bindings to navigate between windows in Screen.

And if I really need power I'll run tabs inside of individual Vim instances within each Screen window.

I really think IDE dependence is one of the things that can prevent agility within a team. As soon as you introduce a product into your stack that a person's IDE doesn't have deep integration with, or doesn't play nicely with, all that productivity that person gained by learning that IDE is all of a sudden gone.

I was that guy & never switched to an IDE because I was really good at tearing through text with the vim model. intellij's vim plugin (ideavim) is top notch. Just having auto completion, find definition, find file and rename are worth the price of admission.

>Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not.

The best programmers I work with use emacs or vim and are good enough to keep up even though most others use intelliJ ides, but it is a handicap, they are just good enough to overcome it. I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE.

> I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE.

Do you really think the best programmers spend enough time refactoring for the use of an IDE to help?

Is refactoring a bad thing now?

>> Do you really think the best programmers spend enough time refactoring for the use of an IDE to help?

> Is refactoring a bad thing now?

It isn't, he just intended that the best programmers refactor less (since they are the best they must get things right or better predict the future more often then the others).

Seems rather unlikely. Do they only have to work on code written by themselves or other great programmers?

"less". If most of your job is refactoring you should probably find a new job because you aren't getting any work done.

Not at all, but assumably it doesn't take up most your time. It's just an easily solvable subset of coding operations.

Refactoring but also code completion (which means you don't have to worry about remembering if the method is add or push) etc.

And yes I know those I work with do, because we work on the same codebase and I see their commits.

If you don't even know the name of the function you want to call, how likely is it that you're aware of its constraints and failure modes?

But then, that's probably why those IDEs ship with sophisticated debuggers, right? ☺

It's a good thing then that those IDEs can show the method's documentation right next to the autocomplete list as you're browsing through it.

Absolutely.

They design it well the first time. They refactor is to a better design as needed as new requirements arise.

Sure, but assumably they do something ASIDE from refactor.