Thanks for your answer, out of interest what languages are you primarily working with and what sort of team and codebase size? It sounds like being forced to consider navigability would offset the tendency for codebase 'melt' in larger IDE assisted projects.
Also one area I lean heavily on an IDE is I can switch codebases up to 4 times in a day between JS and Java, so I'm not going to remember structure most of the time and being able to have all kinds of crutches helps me maintain velocity. Do you find your sense of navigation when swapping is enhanced because you have a deeper understanding of the structure from memory?
I'd say VS Code kind of straddles that middle ground, like an enhanced text editor++. But then full IntelliJ is where I feel most at home so obviously we have different preferences and that's fine. I just worry I'm missing out and heavily dependent on IDEs.
Through a standard work week I code in Go, C, C++, JS (React), Java and Groovy. Odd jobs add Rust, C#, Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS).
There are several backend-heavy Go services, React web applications, kernel and user-space driver work, browser work, Jenkins plugins and pipelines, Gradle plugins. It's very varied based on the specific customer we develop for.
Privately I mostly code C and Rust for open source stuff. Not that I mind Go, but I only find it to be the proper tool for network services, not local code.
When you swap around this much, bad code structure goes from something you write on a tech debt ticket and brute force your way around to being absolute top priority, blocking any review immediately.
Of course, memory enhances navigation speed, but the thing is that a painfully obvious structure requires no real memory of it to understand.
Likewise, maybe one can cope with switching between 2 IDEs, but it doesn't scale.
VSCode is decent, but it's still slow and clunky in my opinion. I'm more of a neovim and sublime text type for speed. An open sourced sublime text thing would be awesome in my opinion.
(The sheer number of projects I work with is an outlier due to our company structure, but I believe the experience is universal)
Also one area I lean heavily on an IDE is I can switch codebases up to 4 times in a day between JS and Java, so I'm not going to remember structure most of the time and being able to have all kinds of crutches helps me maintain velocity. Do you find your sense of navigation when swapping is enhanced because you have a deeper understanding of the structure from memory?
I'd say VS Code kind of straddles that middle ground, like an enhanced text editor++. But then full IntelliJ is where I feel most at home so obviously we have different preferences and that's fine. I just worry I'm missing out and heavily dependent on IDEs.