In another question, Mark speaks highly of IDEs, saying "some people still just dont know "why" they should use one...". As someone who uses vim for programming, and works in an environment where most/all of my colleagues use either vim or emacs for all of their work, what are the advantages of IDEs? Why should I use one?
I'm sure this is a charged issue for some people, and I'm not interested in starting a flame war, so please only reply with the reasons you believe an IDE-based approach is superior. I'm not interested in hearing about why I shouldn't use an IDE; I already don't use one. I'm interested in hearing from "the other side of the fence", so to speak.
If you think that IDEs may be suitable for some types of work but not others, I'm also interested to hear why.
Answer
It really depends on what language you're using, but in C# and Java I find IDEs beneficial for:
- Quickly navigating to a type without needing to worry about namespace, project etc
- Navigating to members by treating them as hyperlinks
- Autocompletion when you can't remember the names of all members by heart
- Automatic code generation
- Refactoring (massive one)
- Organise imports (automatically adding appropriate imports in Java, using directives in C#)
- Warning-as-you-type (i.e. some errors don't even require a compile cycle)
- Hovering over something to see the docs
- Keeping a view of files, errors/warnings/console/unit tests etc and source code all on the screen at the same time in a useful way
- Ease of running unit tests from the same window
- Integrated debugging
- Integrated source control
- Navigating to where a compile-time error or run-time exception occurred directly from the error details.
- Etc!
All of these save time. They're things I could do manually, but with more pain: I'd rather be coding.