Do you have a car? If so, then you know how convenient it is vs. not having a car. I had a car once - it was wonderful. It wasn’t very big, but it got me around, and going places was so much more convenient.

Now I live without a car, and it’s not a big deal. Whenever I have to go places and bring more than I can comfortably carry, I remember back to how it was when I had a car. Sometimes I play around with the idea of getting a new car, until I remember how expensive it is, and how I almost wouldn’t use it at all.

For years now, I’ve been using Emacs for software development. Before that, I used mostly Eclipse. Emacs can of course do everything, if you want it to, but it’s a hassle, so most people use it like an editor with a few extras. An editor vs. an IDE is kind of like not having a car vs. having a car. Sure, you can live without the outlines, file overview, source code formatting, bug tracker integration, visual vcs synchronization, interactive debugging and more … But if you can get it without paying in blood, why wouldn’t you?

When I went from Eclipse to Emacs, one of the first things I missed was interactive debugging. With dynamic languages you no longer need to compile your code explicitly, but people still refuse to move on from printf debugging.With interactive debugging, you can step through the code as it executes, inspecting variables and even edit and re-run code. How can anyone not want this?

People who have used IDEs extensively will probably agree with me, but people who have not will not understand what the big deal is, or feel that it doesn’t apply to them because they use language X and framework Y, which is so much better than Java.

Remember how a few years ago no one needed mobile phones? I do. I guess that makes me old. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that you might have needs that you can’t grasp or acknowledge. Such as mobile phones.

Personally, I started off in Emacs-land, and it was quite strange to start using and IDE, but I was forced to do it (we used Visual Age for Java, which had its own vcs), but with Eclipse I saw the light, and I look forward to using it again (only four weeks left until I start my new/old job).

To prepare, I’ve started playing around with Eclipse again. Below are some screenshots where I’m using Eclipse for Django/Python development.

If you have a project of notable size, an IDE is really useful to help reduce the amount of unecessary information you always have to keep in your head.