Programmer Humor

IntelliJ now requires like 8GiB of RAM to even open.

Depends, for Android app dev, once you gain experience in writing code, and use Kotlin which is way less verbose, it becomes easier. But in reality, the IDE's autocompletion, syntax error highlights and other niceties do save a lot of time.

Kate is great for being a compiled C++ program, making it nice and lightweight. Plus lots of syntax highlighting. Not quite the same as IDEs with auto completion, but pretty good for plain text editing.

I'm so spoiled by searchable settings that it feels like I'm back in the 50s if I actually have to manually click around menus looking for a setting.

6. can also sometimes happen when your workplaces corporate antivirus you can't uninstall, pause, or change any settings on decides to scan your project files while a build is in progress 🤦🤦🤦

Agree. I used a ton of different IDEs too and I can say Rider was the least terrible one I've used professionally (mostly on Unreal Engine projects, so having the thing not kill itself when trying to compute large, complex codebases for syntax highlighting/autocomplete was a requirement).

Number 3 happens all the time to me when using VSCode with Copilot as autocomplete. Copilot sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Also happens a lot when using Pycharm with Python. Sometimes it's great at autocompleting, sometimes it completely gets lost and has no idea what my Python script is doing.

Number 5 also happens a lot on VSCode + Platformio. It also frequently happens on Intellij IDEA for me, but mostly when I am concurrently running build or test while writing. My crappy work laptop suffers from Windows 11 related performance issues, and when there's not enough performance available, underlines do get wonky quite frequently.

VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I'm sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that's a separate issue)

Its good for two main reasons IMO:

1. It is plugin-based

2. It is (therefore) language-agnostic

Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

And then, because it's all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don't like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What's going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.

When I started working for my current employer, I was surprised by how much ram my VDI has. We're not allowed to code on our own devices (but those are still specced out) but 64 Gs of ram in a virtual desktop was a welcome environment to work in.

Hah, per window.

I can't live without VIM keybinds. Maybe I'm a boomer. I do use it as a note taking or "collect my thoughts" app. Or just a place to paste shit when I'm working. Very useful for that. Though only when I'm forced to be on Windows.

vim fast, IDE slow, I use vim because I'm impatient

For a few files, sure. Idk how I'd use that on the large corporate Java codebase that I usually work with though. Despite all its memory hogging and unnecessary features, IntelliJ also proves remarkably useful when trying to find anything in these mega projects. Features like ctrl + clicking on a method call to get to its definition (even when it is in a different project that I don't have checked out), the refactoring tools, the debugger, etc are absolutely necessary to get anything done.

Unless you need to work on a solution with more than a few projects, such as Unity games. Then the LSPs go haywire and eat 20+Gb of memory, while not actually working.

Which, ofc, is Microsoft's fault, since it's their analyzer that has had the bug for years now. Rider didn't have that problem, but it shits itself when you change branches. You can't win :(

IIRC vi has been installed, or perhaps tinyvim, then I always go and install vim-gtk

You should refer to Visual Studio by its full title: "Visual Studio (not responding)".

I legit swore off the entire OS when one of my teachers forced us to use macOS + X code to write Objective C code

Yes, and the worst part is that XCode is only available on OSX.

I once had to make an iOS app once and didn't have a Mac so I developed the entire thing in a VM. There was no video encoding, the FPS was in the low single digits, which made it very difficult to even type. So I ended up writing the code using VSCode through SSH through Wireguard connected to the VM on the host machine, which actually worked surprisingly well. But hey, the app did work in the end.