TLDR: The way I determine whether a “text editing tool”/“thing I use to write software” is a text editor or an IDE is as follows: If it requires more than one second to open/fully start, it is an IDE; if it opens in less than one second, it is a text editor.
Examples
- GNU Nano , and out of the box/vanilla (neo )vim are absolutely text editors because they completely start/open in less than one second.
- Visual Studio is absolutely an IDE because it never opens in less than one second.
Corollaries
Some of these are spicy takes, but follow immediately from my definitions.
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Visual Studio Code is an IDE because it takes more than one second to open, atleast when I use it at work. I vaguely remember VSCode opening more quickly on a Macbook Pro I used for work a couple of years ago. I don’t have a Mac today, however. VSCode may have been a text editor on my Macbook Pro, or my current work setup with Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL ) are making me forget that VSCode was still slow on mac.
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If your chimera of a (neo)vim configuration is so cluttered with random configs that you copied from some random blog/gist 6 years ago, deprecated language servers, keybindings you don’t use, “extensions”/“plugins” that work on neovim 0.7, but not 0.9, and whatever nonsense you vomited in vimscript that you cannot open a file in less than one second, then you have turned your text editor into an IDE. Atleast VSCode isn’t a shitty IDE like your pathetic excude of a (neo)vim configuration/setup.