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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

If all you have to do is Java then absolutely. I hop into IDE's all the time for refactoring work VS or Monodevelop for C# IntelliJ for java and so on. But I work with much more than just java and C#.

Shell utilities that work with plain text can deal with a whole lot more than java. Claiming that an IDE occupies the same place as a shell in a developers toolbox misses a lot of the reason why shells are useful.

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I'm not saying a shell isn't useful. I don't use an IDE for any of my git workflow (I actually find git to be poor on Windows, which is a good reason to choose Linux); but for navigating the code.

Shell utilities that deal with plain text often get the nuance wrong, because they don't have the full syntax tree to deal with. Mostly you're using regular expressions; which often get you close but not quite right. For navigation, people often would use cscope/ctags something else anyway; and text searching often isn't as good as a semantically aware find.

I don't use an IDE beyond vim for my C++ work; but am considering clion. So far I'm not entirely convinced, it doesn't handle some of the more complex C++ constructs correctly.

90% of the stuff I need to do are minor changes that don't need the nuance that requires a full Syntax tree. The other 10% I fire up an IDE for and make the change.

For vim and C++ I recommend YouCompleteMe[0]. It gets a lot of it right.

[0] https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe

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