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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited to see all these new IDE projects, but have we pretty much given up on having a good, integrated debugger?

I think we have. Debuggers are highly language specific. It's just easier to have a separate debugger for each language.

I think it'd be nice if some of the IDEs gave up on forcing everything into their project structure. There's a real market for stand alone visual debuggers that don't try to manage your entire project.

But that was the whole point of an IDE: it integrated the development environment, piecing together the editor, the compiler, and the debugger, taking advantage of intimate knowledge of the specific targets. Why are we suddenly calling a text editor an "IDE"?

> Why are we suddenly calling a text editor an "IDE"?

I suspect because lots of developers actually use those text editors as their main development environment. So they have the D and the E parts of that equation covered.

Also since these editors tend to be highly configurable, with a bit tweaking the user can make the editor do a lot of the I as well.

I also use a text editor as my primary development tool, yet I do not call it an IDE. I repeat: the whole point of an IDE is to be a truly integrated development environment, piecing together the editor, the compiler, and the debugger, taking advantage of intimate knowledge of the specific targets. If you don't have an integrated debugger, you are not using an IDE. There is no shame in that, but it still doesn't make any sense to be calling the tool an IDE unless it, well, is an IDE. It seems like the more useful thought is then "people seem to have stopped using IDEs as much", not "IDEs have given up on integrating features like the compiler and the debugger"... if you aren't integrating the compiler and the debugger, we already have a word for that: text editor.

I think some people (including myself) prefer to get something barebones and add plugins/addons/extensions to get just what we need.

I can run some monolithic IDE like Eclipse that comes with everything I need plus a bunch of stuff I'll never use or I can take Sublime Text/vim and add just the right combination of packages to fit my needs.

You have also described me; I do not feel the need to call Vim an "IDE". I even appreciate that it can be turned into an IDE (though I do not do this: I currently prefer to use separate tools), but it doesn't become an IDE until after you've added enough plugins to have covered the functionality of at least "compiler" and "debugger". In essence, I'm confused by your response, as it seems to indicate that "because some people don't want an IDE, they choose to call things that are not IDEs using the name IDE".

Slickedit integrates itself with lots of debuggers so I'd assume given enough interest Atom could be made to as well. Besides, given it's based partly based on chromium you could use the chromium devtools as a starting point and try to adapt them to multiple languages.

I found this concept quite neat: An "always on" debugger (for javascript) http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4945

Being hackable, I presume that integrating a remote debugger should be possible. Vim can already technically do it - just that most people who cared about integrated debugging were probably using emacs.

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