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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

> "I have one file called index.js"

Say it all really. Online coding tools may be fine for beginners, but think it would be next to impossible to do my work with one.

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What if all the features of an IDE existed for online coding tools? I actually maintain a list of these tools[0] and several of them are very close to the native experience.

In particular, CodeSandbox has come a long way by basically running VS Code in the browser.

[0]: https://github.com/styfle/awesome-online-ide

They still would not be nearly as fast. When I'm working with projects consisting of hundreds of files measuring hundreds of lines each, I need an IDE that's capable of using the full performance of my workstation

That's true, especially for client-side based online IDEs. At Repl.it we have a hybrid approach where a lot of the IDE-like functions like code intellisense run on the server: https://repl.it/blog/intel

A counter-argument to this is that all files you need are stored in 'the cloud' and performing searches/indexing/refactoring would happen _faster_ than on your workstation because it can take advantage of a lot more 'cloud' resources.

My work computer is 8 cores, 32gb and a GPU; why do you imagine that a hosted instance somewhere running the web server is going to do a better or faster job than my local computer? Hell, even my laptop is going to do a better job than a cloud server.

Not 'a hosted instance' or 'a cloud server', but many. An arbitrary amount. Personal anecdote: Local full builds for me take 28-30 minutes. When I farm it out to our infrastructure in AWS it takes 9 minutes.

Well, I actually do all my professional work inside (neo)vim.

I even use to have a remote instance for developing and testing... I can definitely do all my work in a simple (multiplexed) terminal, whenever it is online or offline.

Of course, given a stable connection.

Where did you get this from? The blog you're reading this on is built and hosted on Repl.it (https://amasad.me/__repl) and it's source is 50 files and if you count node_modules that's thousands of files.

The bottom image, its a Reddit screenshot.

Yeah they're describing their current issue, doesn't mean that's all he needs or all that it provides.

I have to agree, I mean sure PyCharm can be complicated, but it has so many things that a beginner doesn't need and doesn't understand that to me doesn't even seem fair to put them on the same plane. Sure, you write code in both of them, but they don't really serve the same purpose.

Ultimately the best dev environment is one you have full control over. Even if it's X forwarding over SSH, at least you know you've configured the tools on the remote system.

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