Ask HN: Why don't you use IDE?

My experience with IDEs is limited to Visual Studio and Eclipse. Have toyed with IntelliJ - but didn't go deep with it.

For me IDEs are slow, complicated and the screens cluttered. There are so many panels, options, buttons, etc. All I want to see is the code. With vi and multiple screens I can have more than enough windows open. I let the compiler generate warnings and errors. With a fast machine running make I hardly ever have to wait too long.

Besides, cutting code is only about 30% of the effort in a project. Documentation, testing, support, meetings and more meetings take up the bulk of my time. I actually enjoy the time I get to do real work! Being more hands on feels good to me.

I know this will not be a popular answer but if your program is too complicated to understand in a text editor I think you might have a problem.

I will however use an IDE if I'm inheriting a project that I can hardly make sense of.

Because VIM works so much better for me than any IDE ever has. It just works, it's installed everywhere, I don't need graphics to use it (so I can use it on remote machines), it's fairly scriptable (this is the only thing I have to give the Emacs guys -- they have a proper programming language for scripting). Most importantly, I only need to know how to use one text editor, as opposed to some languages where you need to change IDEs to actually do anything (see: Xcode, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc).

Nothing against IDEs as i have used many in the past. Once i started working with a large number of distributed systems, having VIM or Emacs foo became sufficient.

I like to keep it simple.

I use both.