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Comment by Qwertious | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

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But not with file extensions of .txt. They should only do bells and whistles if the extension warrants some bells. .md, sure syntax highlight me. But opening .txt and treating it as html, that seems strange.

> But opening.txt and treating it as html, that seems strange.

I’d go as far as to call it negligent, not merely strange.

Well, on Unix file extensions are a convention and don't have any strict semantic meaning. Maybe this doesn't make sense in a world where most people do think in terms of file extensions (thanks to the popularity of Windows) but it shouldn't be surprising that non-Windows programs might not special-case file extensions.

(Though in fairness, text editors do usually have special casing for file extensions and these days tools like ls will colour filenames based on the extension.)

This is only a Unix vs Windows thing in terms of the application launcher and how it is implemented. File extensions are semantically meaningful for many unix tools, most notably gcc.

Also meaningless for vastly more UNIX tools. Also, Gnu’s not UNIX.

I don't know anyone who says that an IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles. Visual Studio Code is a text editor with more bells and/or whistles than a choo-choo train, but that doesn't make it any more of an IDE than nano and termux.

VS code is an IDE by any reasonable measure. Nano is not.

It compiles and debugs, that seems like an IDE to me.

VS Code is cool and all, but it definitely is a lot more manual and laborious than VS. the tooling and automation in VS is missed if you’re used to it.

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