Advantages of an IDE?

Question

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Why should I use an IDE?

I'm not too sure if this question is really on topic, but it seems to be...

At first I thought I was missing something or maybe haven't done enough GUI-based programming - I'm a student just starting my programming/software engineering education - but then I thought about the web development I've done.

What, really, is the advantage of using an IDE to do development work in? For example, what advantages are there to using Dreamweaver over gedit or any other text editor (Notepad, anyone?)?

I find Dreamweaver to be overly cluttered and distracting - there's just too much on screen for me to work efficiently. Similarly, I tried to use Eclipse when looking at Java in my free time. In all honesty, the complicatedness of the IDE completely put me off and I left it.

So, yeah, am I missing the point here or something? Why would one use an IDE over a basic text editor?

Answer 1

Your can find your answer here

Why should I use an IDE

Answer 2

The fact that you have many integrated tools is the point.

• You don't need to leave the editor in order to debug
• Syntax highlighting
• An editor that "understands" you code
• You get intellisense/autocomplesion
• Included help
• Easy navigation of your code base
• Access to a test suite
• Static analysis

and more, depending on IDE. All of these assist with development and make it faster.

Answer 3

REASON: Enhance development speed!

This is realized thanks a better integration of:

• file types and their tools (resource editor, GUI builder, ...)
• source control
• switching to related code parts
• metrics
• debugging
• managing configurations

A text editor usually doesn't know much about programming. It has enough knowledge to provide some highlighting and folding but usually doesn't go that far. The question to ask yourself is more which IDE suits best the project. Sometimes for really very small projects a text editor might indeed be an adequate solution.