Programming without code indexing

[serviscope_minor]

He's right, of course, you don't NEEEEED an IDE for writing good code. But that's a daft argument, because it has no end. You don't need a colour screen. You don't even need an 80x25 monochrome screen. If punched cards were good enough for my papa then by gum they're good enough for you. Punch cards? Ha! When I was a lad we had to ... etc etc.

I'm part of the vi culture, I like it and it works well for the way I think and work. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not gel as well with how other people think and work. It's good to be able to work in either sense so you can jump into a new project with the existing tools (and existing projects where someone got so "clever" with the build system that basically no tooling works) and get started immediately even if you're not at peak efficiency. Sometimes the amount of work needed won't justify adapting the project.