As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff.
> As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff.
That's the point, we shouldn't be concerned, and it's best achieved by giving us equipment that lets us take this stuff off our minds
Engineers tend to grow out of it.
Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
If I may be blunt, bullshit. Working on a remote server, especially one not on your local lan, is a lag filled pain in the ass.
Even if you decide to work on a local editor and upload to the cloud, your write-test cycle will be slower, and the best editors will require quite a few CPU cycles themselves to provide (their version of) intellisense, syntax highlighting, and documentation.
And this doesn't even cover ensuring that the computer is capable of handling remote conferencing - a resource drain to end all resource drains on laptops.
I'd go one step further and say that as I gained experience, I realized the value of the productivity gains from low latency and the freedom offered by working locally (I even keep local copies of documentation websites, so I never have to worry about them being down).
> Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
Internet can still go out in an office. So can power. People travel, work from home, and sometimes work from a conference. Why limit your employees for the sake of saving 1% of a software developer's salary (less, actually, when you consider amortization)?
Not all software is designed to run on servers.
In some cases, building locally will give a quicker response cycle.
Editing locally is almost always a better user experience. Especially if your servers aren't in the same building.
And plenty of other reasons (travel, flexibility, ...)
Anecdotally, I had to work this way once for an employer. It worked rather well, but our "development" machines were on-premises, and when they went down, everybody was down. I was also extremely limited in what I could download and run, since the machine was shared with other developers. Not very productive.
Though, I did get really good with Vim, so I am thankful for that.
Occasionally you encounter weird toolchains where some stuff is much more convenient to do from the IDE, so you end up editing files in emacs then having Quartus or Vivado open to look at their reports.
(People should be a bit more specific about their working environment before confidently declaring the best way to do things!)
I've attempted to write Java using VIM. I've even been moderately successful. But it's still easier to do with Eclipse or Intellij.
Why? I have a full command line suite running on my laptop, because I'm running Linux. Why would I log in elsewhere, when I can run stuff locally?
I'm personally an emacs user for most purposes, but I'm not going to claim it's the right tool for everyone, all the time.
I run emacs locally. In X. That way I can browse the web, view PDFs & images, play Tetris in colour &c. I wonder how advanced the nethack mode is these days …